That's what the internet has done. And booze being easy to get from every supermarket and corner shop so why bother making it. My father used to play in a local band that did socials, dinner-dances etc. for clubs and societies and such like. Home made wine societies were among their regulars. Do any of them they still exist?

Steve

Beautiful, absolutely beautiful. I love the muted, soft, dreamy look.

Steve

Welcome back. Looking forward to seeing a photo or two from your new-found enthusiasm for older lenses .

Just a couple of thoughts before you decide whether to sell your AF lenses. First, if any of them is a macro lens, keep it - if manual everything takes you towards macro (which is mainly a MF activity), you can simply ignore its AF capability like most macro photographers do . Second, beware the curse of declining eyesight - I'm increasingly dependent on AF as an antidote to cataracts (one eye still good enough for MF, but for how long...??).

Steve

Just to follow up dadidwozhere's point about cost of FF lenses. The prices of new, latest generation, Pentax FF and APS-C lenses with similar fields of view are much the same. Examples (full prices): DA 11-18mm f2.8 (APS-C) £1,199, D-FA 15-30mm f2.8 (FF) £1,629 so APS-C is a bit cheaper; DA 16-50mm f2.8 (APS-C) £1,349, D-FA 24-70mm f2.8 £1,179 so FF is a bit cheaper. So if you prefer buying new (and can afford it!), lens price shouldn't be a factor in whether to go FF or APS-C. Used prices are, of course, a completely different matter, being determined by demand, supply, desirability, latest fad etc.

I'll also second the point about using old glass to advantage on crop frame cameras. A couple of my old film-era zooms that weren't exactly brilliant with film turned out to be better than expected on APS-C because the sensor was only using the centre of the image circle where IQ was best. Looked at the other way round, though, an old lens which you like on APS-C might disappoint on FF.

Steve

Yes, but not as many pixels for sensors of the same technology and generation. Crop the K1 ii sensor to APS-C leaves about 16 Mpx, the K3 line has about 25 Mpx. It's a trade-off between number and size of pixels, with implications for resulution, noise, colour accuracy etc. My simple view of life is to make a choice, stop worrying about whether you've chosen the best, take photographs and enjoy yourself .

Steve

It's a question I've asked myself once or twice since the K1 came out. I've stayed with APS-C for several reasons, which might or might not be relevant to you, for example:
- Weight and size. I'm not getting any younger or fitter...
- Type of photography. I've increasingly been wanting more and more magnification, both for close-up/macro and things at long distance. The crop factor of an APS-C sensor helps here. If you tend to go for the wider view then full frame might be more attractive.
- How the photograph will be viewed. A full frame camera might well give better image quality, more accurate colours etc. , but as I was mainly going to view photos as images on a screen then would I really see a noticeable difference? I decided that the answer was no. However, if I were wanting A3 prints for hanging on a wall...

In the end, though, as a hobby photographer the real benefit you'd get from a full frame camera is that you'd no longer have to live with a nagging doubt that you might be missing out on something really good. After all, a hobby is mainly about being happy .

Steve

Nice to see some photos from the new film camera. And a nice set, too - which is a compliment to the photographer even more than it is a comment on the camera.

It isn't for the likes of us. It's for a generation of mobile phone photographers who see the world in portrait format, have discovered a trendy thing called film, aren't wanting/able to face the complications of an SLR and are willing to pay much more than the puchase price of the camera for a ticket to a Taylor Swift** concert. (**Other expensive artists are available). I would imagine that the developing houses are rubbing their hands with glee - it's more business!

Shouldn't knock the camera's capabilities (or lack of). They're not far off what I moved to (a long time ago...) when I took a step beyond a Kodak Brownie 127. An SLR only came several years later. Who knows what today's buyer of a Pentax 17 might do in the future??

Steve

Thanks folks, appreciated.

Definitely worth a visit if you're in the area during flowering season. And with so much of the area dependent on tourism, we need your tourist ££s !!!

Actually quite tricky to get decent reflections, there are so many leaves getting in the way. Waders and waist deep in water would improve the chances, but...

And they are only a shadow of the beauty of the flowers when seen face to face. There's something about water lilies that, for me, puts them in a totally different class of beauty compared with other types of flower.

Steve

Bennetts Water Gardens are - not unexpectedly for somewhere comprising large pools of water - flat. Very flat. No rises, hillocks or similar to provide visual focus for wide angle views. Most of the interest is on or around the flat surfaces of the pools. So time for an experiment. Would a fisheye lens do anything interesting? Here's what the Pentax 10-17mm did on a K3iii at various focal lengths.

Thoughts, comments etc. welcome as usual.

1. FL 10mm



2. FL 13mm



3. FL 11mm



4. FL 17mm



5. FL 17mm




Steve

You tickled my curiosity so I had to find out. It's thermo-electric cooling (TLC). Put two different materials in contact, pass a direct current across the junction and one side heats up, the other cools down. Dispose of heat to atmosphere and you've got a solid-state fridge. That's the principle, anyway, turning it into a practical gizmo seems to be a bit tricky.

From what I can understand of the principle, it's temperature difference that counts so the temperature you dial in might be the difference with respect to ambient rather than the actual temperature of the sensor - perhaps worth checking.

Steve