All I said, was that I was beginning to find much amateur photography formulaic and bland. That can't be construed as making anyone 'bad.'

Certainly, I don't think that because I don't like something it or its maker is 'bad'.

I really was just stating my point of view. And anyway, just as many people enjoy bland lift music, I am sure many people enjoy what I might consider 'lift' photography.

But hey, Martin, if the cap fits wear it.
As a lifelong blues guitar player, I find nothin' wrong with bein' bad to the bone as John Lee would put it

Maybe it's just me but I find that statement breathtaking.

It's the stock reason people give for pirating Photoshop.

Here's another analogy. It's a warm day so I leave my windows open. Someone reaches through and takes my camera.

I'm not losing anything because the bloke wouldn never have bought it anyway.

You (one) could argue that your work has no value and you don't care if someone steals it but I think my work does have value and I do not want it stolen. Your argument does not stand generalisation.

Apart from anything else, theft is morally wrong.

That's it, isn't it? People don't pay for online newspapers, for BBC drama online, so many things seem to be free that they don't perceive anything on the web as having monetary value.

The big trick to earning money from photography is to take pictures that no else (or at least, very few) people have and that they cannot do for themselves.

A pic of a flask has no rarity value and is therefore worth little. But, to make a personal example, in 1977 I took the last studio pix of The Who before Keith Moon died. I have had, for 30 years, a 60-40 deal with my agent in my favour and that 60% on that picture has earned me, I estimate, around £12,000 over that time, excluding the first exclusive sales which obviously earn money in each country quickly.
I organised that picture myself with the band's management so it was exclusive to me.
Had there been twenty other photographers there, I doubt I would have earned £500 from it in all.

The effect of technology is to open up photography to many more people. That's why you see so many paps scrabbling to make a living.

But another effect is to put mediocre photographer out of business because with so many technicalities taken care of automatically, folk do it for themselves.

Technology does not much affect the original or talented photographer. He (or she) is selling his way of looking at things, his ability to add value to the assignment - often his own personality is his biggest asset. The technical ability is taken for granted. In fact, many of the most successful photogs have an assistant to do the technical stuff for them.

If someone sold an exclusive shot for a cover to time for $30 either they or their agent is an idiot.

I only know the editorial business but I can see that many people would baulk at paying a big sum for professional wedding coverage. My niece, though, paid a hefty fee for her wedding pix. Three years on, the money is forgotten but the lovely set of pix the photographers supplied lives on.

When a photographer makes an image, as John Riley says, the copyright is automatically theirs. They cannot, however, copyright the idea, so if someone sees the image stands in the same spot and reproduces it exactly, they are perfectly free to do that.

Given that the image is the property of the photographer, if someone simply takes it for their own use, that is theft. For someone who would otherwise not buy it, would it not be perfectly simple and more honest to ask permission from the author and credit them?

I'm surprised anyone here would seek to justify stealing other's work in any way at all.

p.s While you can't stop Google from indexing your images on sites like flickr, if you have your own web space you can use an .htaccess file to tell them not to. Google's robots do respect that.

It's one of my pet criticisms of modern photography, particularly amateur photography, that once photoshopped, there is a depressing sameness about so much work.

All skies are perfect summer or heavy 'moody' cloudy. All pictures tonally cover the entire brightness range. Skins are blemish free. There are no trees or telegraph poles in the 'wrong' place.

In the end, amateur photography is becoming a series of picture postcards.

I'm obviously generalising here and there are great exceptions to what I'm saying. But this sort of 'prettify' process is so easy to do with PS that it is becoming ubiquitous and ultimately boring. Just as there is 'lift' music, we are now getting a kind of 'lift' photograph.

And I don't exclude myself from this process, I hasten to add!

RAW and JPEG aren't competing, they are aspects of the same thing.

It's a bit like a baking a cake. With RAW, you have all the ingedients and you decide what combination, amount and cooking to use. The cake will be to your personal taste.

With JPEG, the ingredients are the same but the combination, amount and cooking are largely decided for you by Pentax programmers. They are experienced and will choose good compromises.

I shoot in RAW because it means I can always go back to my basic ingedients and change them the how I wish for different purposes.

For example, for on line display jpeg is more than good enough. But the same picture being prepared for an exhibition and printed at 16x12, TIFF with its total lack of compression is more suitable. With RAW I can choose. With jpeg I have at source discarded a great deal of the information I have bought a DSLR to supply.

You can argue that you can't see the difference for on line competitions but that would apply to better quality lenses and any sensor of more than screen size pixel dimensions too.

Unfortunately long lenses don't magnify anything like as much as one would think. A 500mm gives about 14 times the magnification of a standard 35mm lens.

At 1km it will be roughly the same as image size as a 35mm standard lens at 1000/14 = roughly 70 metres. A dolphin at this range will be will be tiny.

As gartmore says, you are attempting the impossible. Fun to try but you will need to be much, much closer to get anything worthwhile in image size, let alone sharp.

I have all the lenses I need and my GX20 produced picture quality mostly beyond my needs, so provided it continues to work I don't care whether they drop it or not.

The mirror system is reliable, the viewfinder image is subject to no processing delay, the colours are as nature intends and you can change the screen to suit your own preferences.

When the EVF matches or surpasses this for price and performance, then EVF we will all have.