That's it for this week - over to Gartmore....

"The Boy In Blue"

After looking carefully at both, I'm inclined to think that the second shot is marginally sharper.

It would be helpful to post the first picture but without the TC being used and cropping the image to the same size as before. Then we could see if the lens+TC was better or worse than the lens alone+blowing up the image.

The two images posted unfortunately are not really comparable.

On the subject of theft I suppose a thief would take your PC (or Mac) and your external hard drives, but would be unlikely to want a pile of used CDs.

I know of one RAID array where three of four drives failed at the same time. Nothing electronic is infallible.

You could try an impromptu test by putting a few identical files on a vaiety of makes of CD or DVD and then leaving them out in the sun for a while. Then we could see which ones degraded quickest by testing them all every day or so.

Who really knows how long these things will last. We have CDs that have now lasted a few years and so far there are no corrupted ones. Always CD-R or DVD-R and not RW as the re-writables may be more suspect.

However, to put it in perspective, our 30 year-old colour negatives have suffered quite a lot and the best survivors have been black and white negs and Kodachrome slides. Virtually none of the images damaged are really critical, although it was nice to make a colour print of my late Grandmother for the first time.

I would use the best possible quality disks, store them in a dark cool place and then just hope for the best.

We were in Norway last week and there was a fair bit of wind, rain and snow (although it was never really cold) so for the first time we really started to appreciate the weather sealing on the K10D. We just carried on shooting whatever the weather and the cameras got very, very wet without any problems whatsoever.

This is fantastic, because in the days of film we wouldn't have dared the same conditions, especially with electronic bodies.

Now the lenses we have are not weather sealed, but with a judicious amount of shielding they survived well enough. They got wet, but not as wet as the camera bodies, and they survived without steaming up inside.

A good trip made better by being able to carry on shooting.

Thanks for that Terry.

I was upgrading Norton on a PC today and noticed that it can potentially block cookies, although it described tracking cookies as "low risk". I don't know if that's helpful or not but it could point to over-zealous anti-virus software being a potential problem.

There's a cryptic comment....