Frames aside, I like the photograph. One of the best I've seen posted here for a while.

The new issue of AP dropped through my letterbox this morning and the first thing I noticed was a huge glossy fold-out 4 page advertisment for the Pentax K100D.

It was been awarded the 2007 Amateur Photographer Novice Digital SLR of the Year award.

Well done Pentax, and well done AP for actually noticing a Pentax camera.

With all the features it has, the K100D may be aimed at beginners but it has all the capabilities of any high end DSLR.

Ehat's both the blessing and the curse of the darkroom. If you can find the time it's a good way to spend a day. But it does take a full day....

That was the title of the presentation I did last night at ADAPS (Atherton & District Amateur Photographic Society) and one section of this trip into the past was a selection of black and white prints from the vaults....(I speak figuratively, we don't really have either a vault or an archive...)

The prints I showed spanned from the club's beginnings in 1938 up to the 1990s and to be honest the best of these were absolutely stunning. The purpose was to review where we stood in terms of the quality of our digital prints, and although they are good they don't yet cut mustard compared to the best of the old Chlorobromide prints.

Beautiful warm tones, deep and detail filled shadows, incredible sharpness, delicate highlights, you name it it was there.

The pure bromide prints were also incredible and one in particular which was predominantly black had to be seen to be believed. Talk about deep rich blacks.....all a result of older silver-rich paper emulsions.

Yes, very interesting, and although it's not sending me back into the darkroom it's a good reminder that there is still work to be done to achieve the same standards. It's probably the printer that will get attention next because I have a feeling that is a weak point in the chain.

It was a good night and it's given us all something to think about in terms of print quality.

The MX uses a totally different sort of shutter to the ME and A series cameras, and hence needs either Winder MX or Motor Drive MX.

The MX shutter is a horizontally running rubberised silk mechanical shutter. The ME etc use a vertically running electronically controlled metal shutter.

We'll make for the PU stand around 12 noon on the Sunday. Be pleased to see anyone who can be there!

The K10D produces images 3872 x 2592 pixels.

At 72ppi (screen resolution) that image is 136.6 x 91.44 cm

With no interpolation (upsizing or downsizing) at 300ppi (printing resolution) you would have a print of 32.78 x 21.95cm (12.904 x 8.64 inches) which is slightly larger than A4.

However, Photoshop is perfectly capable of interpolating that image to larger sizes and prints of A3 or larger are no problem whatsoever.

If you do have access to Photoshop, then the Image>Image Size dialog box will enable you to play around with all these values and see for yourself what the effect is.

Just to clarify the point, Photoshop is the industry standard and as a consequence is pretty much an essential for many people.

Personally I could use any one of a number of programs, but I like Photoshop and actually have a bit of a preference for Photoshop 7.

So if I happen to say "Photoshop" you can happily substitute any alternative that suits what you want to do.

Now where did I put the Hoover....

OK, in the absence of Photoshop, try upping the in-camera sharpening and maybe the contrast as well as this will increase apparent sharpness.

As regards the lens, using medium apertures will give the best results. So f8 to f16 will typically be optimum on that type of zoom, with f22 tailing off. The better the lens the more you will notice the drop in quality. It is true that f22 will give more DOF, but it's at a price and going too far for top quality results. If it was windy, your subject was moving as well and that will also induce blurring at such slow shutter speeds.

If no tripod, then use a high shutter speed in good light and make your comparisons there.

However, without getting to grips with Photoshop or some other image editing program I can't see you'll get the best out of the K10D.

There are a few factors involved here. First, the camera - the fuji models have quite aggressive in-camera sharpening and hence tend to look quite punchy. They are also quite noisy and rather "ragged" in some ways. I use a S7000 for pictures for eBay. It's great for that, but I wouldn't use it generally by choice.

The K10D is more conservative regarding sharpening, leaving it to the photographer to sort that out in Photoshop. This is better for quality work as no artifacts are introduced in camera. You will need more Unsharp Mask. I use a radius of around 1.9-2.0 and a value of 100 - 150%. Threshold low, maybe 1-3. Then the pictures are sharp.

You can't test sharpness using a camera handheld. 1/25 sec is too slow to do this, f11 is fine, but 1250 ISO sensitivity a little unrealistic. Try a tripod, f8-f16, ISO 100 and then we'll be talking sharpness.

The second picture isn't helped by the slow shutter speed (did it move slightly on the table?) but certainly not with an aperture of f22, by which time difraction effects will be reducing resolution significantly.

In summary, try a more consistent technique, with a sturdy tripod ( a flimsy one is no good) and with more sharpening in Photoshop. Then there should be no problem and you can start to enjoy the more subtle, higher quality of the pentax K10D.

Hope that helps!