The composition is good and the overall effect interesting, but I do feel that the whole is very over-processed. This gives an artificial look to the image, especially in the tree branches, each one of which is surrounded by a clear halo, presumably from over-sharpening.

Clearly a lot of work has gone into this and I feel that a stronger original subject with less post processing would have been more satisfying.

However, I expect that you have learnt quite a bit along the path and that in itself is very worthwhile.

You are very likely to have a problem at very close distances of the on-camera flash being partially obscured by the lens.

A ring flash would be the perfect answer, plus a small XtraFlash to one side to improve the modelling if that is more to your liking. The results from this set up look pretty good to me.

The paperless office destroys more trees than ever before. Paperlerss? I'm sinking under a mass of paper...which of course is exactly the point you are making.

Although there has been quite a lot of change in quality terms, I don't think there has been much of a sea-change in computing since I first switched on Windows 95 on my very first computer.

I had a 1GB hard drive and 16MB of RAM. But the basic layout and process was the same then as now. It was slightly slower, but as computer power has increased so has the requirement in the programs we use. And so it goes on - as George says, slowly evolving.

A realtive went to Canada and filmed the crossing of the praries by car. After two hours watching the white lines in the road flashing by (we are very polite viewers) we said "Perhaps we should watch the other half later?"

The reply was "Oh, it's not half way through, we taped it on half speed..."

Please don't ever contemplate going down the route of Video Only.

Chromatic abberation shows up typically as purple fringing and is a reult of the three colours of light not all focusing in exactly the same spot. There are also effects from oblique light at the edge of the CCD causing light spillage and diffraction effects that amount to the same thing.

Digital lenses should be better in this respect, and many of them are. Likewise, APO (apochromatic) lenses are corrected for all light colours, not just two as in an achromatic lens. Of course there are degrees of how well these vcorrections are made, and some cheaper APO lenses may not be particularly good.

The effect you have here, which is quite difficult to see on my monitor, seems to be more of a halo and it looks like a sharpening artefact. It is really difficult to be sure without being able to examine the file properly.

Did you sharpen this a little too much. Some RAW converters automatically sharpen by default and if you have sharpened as well it may have been too much.

CA is present to some degree in many lenses, especially older ones designed for film. It can be corrected for in software. It is worse in high contrast areas, such as branches against the sky.

Hope that helps!

Never found the adapters to be very satisfactory with the Flashtrax, so we ended up with a Epson P2000 which has a SD slot, and a very large screen, which is nice.

That seems very fair. Thanks for the link, George.

I originally thought the 12-24mm and 24-90mm would make a fantastic pair of lenses, but in reality most of my shots were in the middle, meaning lots and lots of lens changing...not a good idea with a DSLR.

This is why, regardless of anything we can read in terms of advice it is critically important to consider exactly what our own requirements are and why. This may be the trick, but it's not an easy thing to decide sometimes.

My usual kit consists of the 12-24mm, 16-45mm, 50mm and 50-200mm Pentax lenses, all DA apart from the 50mm which is a manual focus A.

I do have a 24-90mm, but the above line up doesn't really need it. It stays on my MZ3 for those rare days when I shoot film...

This is a difficulty when getting advice from forums as we don't know what size people are printing to, and equally well we don't know what their subjective quality expectations are.

If you want superb A3 prints and files that will happily grace magazine pages then the SMC Pentax-DA 18-55mm stopped down will be fine and the SMC Pentax-DA 16-45mm will be better and at wider apertures.

IMHO the Sigmas and others are not up to the same standard, but that depends on what criteria you apply.