Artificial rain? Whatever next. I'll tell you after the judging.

That would indeed be a Cunning Plan.

It's not the flashgun you need to worry about, it's the camera. Old film cameras should be fine with all flash but modern electronic cameras can be damaged by the high trigger voltages of some old flashguns.

In general (and I am mindful that many great images break the "rules" a fence running across an image creates exactly what it is - a barrier. This prevents our eye going beyond and spoils the flow of an image. A fence leading into an image from foreground to background would usually be more successful. Other lead-in lines are paths, rail tracks, roads, contours of the land and so on.

Looking at lots of published images is helpful and thinking about what makes them successful. The shooting lots and lots of images. Practice makes perfect!

The colours of this image are very pleasant but the scene is not very dramatic, nor is the lighting. A little work on the composition would help enormously.

Hope that helps!

Hay-on-Wye is one of our favourite places and every now and again we spend a couple of days there, just looking at books.

Can you really not have noticed all the innovation of the past 30+ years?

The downside to your dream lens is that it would probably be
Very bulky
Very heavy
Have a very small maximum aperture
Have poor control of distortion
Be inferior in performance to more modest lenses
Be very expensive

Apart from that it would be terrific! However, at one time a 12-24mm f4 zoom would have been impossible, so at some point in the future who knows what might happen.

10-1000mm f1.2 zoom anyone?

Many thanks to all the paticipants and to Dr Mhuni for his usual thoughtful assessment.

Giving Tree - well done! - please set a new subject in a new thread and just wait for those entries to pour in.

Pentax User In The Rain:

If simultaneously two different cameras are behaving in a new way then certainly it cannot be the cameras.

However, a JPEG file from the camera can't be more than 4.5MB and when opened on the PC might well be 18MB or more (I haven't checked the exact fugures). When you save the image after opening it save it as a TIFF, which is an uncompressed lossless format.

The only thing I can think of is that perhaps you are saving the files after they have been opened as a JPEG and the Vista OS or your editing program is applying some default compression that you need to change.