I rarely use filters with digital cameras, so none are essential as such. It depends on your shooting style, but the only things that can't be done in Photoshop are polarisers, graduated ND filters (not totally true) and big stoppers.

Point an shoot cameras are generally set up to be sharper from the start as the expectation is that users won't be bothering much with post processing. You can use them to go straight to print.

DSLRs are more sophisticated and users probably sharpen post capture, using Photoshop or some other program.

If you use JPEG capture you can increase the sharpness in-camera by altering the sharpness settings. I use +1 to slightly sharpnen, in line with what fotoLibra will accept in their submission guidelines. Use more if it suits you better.

The lens is probably a pre-digital super-zoom, not ideal really. Try a Pentax 18-135mm or 17-70mm and you'll probably be amazed. Try a prime lens you might be even more amazed, depending on what you shoot.

Camera shake takes the edge off sharpness of course, so try some tripod shots to establish if your current lens is good enough or not.

It was really an open question and there is no real answer, except that as far as I know he did not combine negatives. Plenty of other photographers did, including I suspect many of those club members who now complain about Photoshop.

It was common practice for club photographers to go out shooting interesting skies and to have a collection of sky negatives. These could then be inserted into other images as required.

There were and probably are painting competitions as well. Humans are competitive by nature, so will want to compete with whatever skill set they have. Judging is the tricky thing.

Ansel Adams called his negatives the score and his prints the performance and he worked on them very extensively to ensure that performance was superb. Does all this mean that now such prints would be regarded as too good to be true?

By and large clubs have competitions with print and projected sections.

Prints are almost all from digital files, although there are still quite a few darkroom workers out there, young and old.

Projected images are virtually 100% digital, but some clubs allow slides as well. Mixing slides and digital in the same competition section is not a happy experience for the slides though. They don't look as bright or as sharp because the digital projectors outshine them.

No, but it has brought lots of people in who don't like technology but do have a natural "eye" for an image. They see it, the camera makes it for them.

Elitism is probably the wrong word.

Consider the club photographer, an expert in his own field, producing images that for years have been lauded as top notch...then digital comes along. Young photographers with no expert knowledge suddenly outstrip him, producing images he could only ever dream of.

In this scenario, which I guess is something like what is beilng alluded to, it's more fear of not being able to maintain the position of expert, through an inability to cope with very different techniques. The old photographer is swept away....

He resents being on the scrap heap rather than he feels Elitist towards a photographic purity. Probably.

And another image removed. February ain't March.

Pentax didn't have a digitally designed lens for the 645D, but they did when they released it.

I think if they do release a FF DSLR then they will certainly have a lens to package with it.

So when I was in the darkroom and added skies that weren'y there, dodged, burned, combined negatives...was it wrong?

If it was, then that can be consistent with the argument that too much Photoshop is wrong.

If it wasn't, then all Photoshop does is the same. It's even based on darkroom work in its terminology. In this case, it makes no difference.

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