Your settings would seem OK. To see what I mean about the white spots, save the image from here, open it in Picasa and apply a lot of fill light. It'll show them up very well.

Do the same with the original and if they are not there it must be something applied by the upload process.

There's a lot of noise even in the 'straight from camera' image. Do you have NR turned on? Did you shoot RAW or JPG?

The area outside the moon's circumference should be totally black, unless a star is in shot. It's speckled with white dots in your shot, and that's nothing to do with the lens, unless it is truly filthy, which I doubt.

Sorry Mike. I have a villa for rent if you want to see them next year

I'm using Picasa web albums and it seems that the EXIF data is being stripped out during the upload process. I can find no setting within Picasa to change this behaviour.

I don't know why some of the EXIF data might be missing. I haven't purposely removed it.

I'll look into it.

The only time I noticed the inherent barrel distortion was when I tried to copy a large'ish print. It was hopeless and I resorted to my FA 50mm Macro for the job.

A couple of years ago I witnessed this in my own garden. *istD with Sigma 400mm 1:5.6, which was then my longest lens, and not very good wide open as you'll see.




Here's the whole series, well, those worth showing anyway.

These were all shot with the DA* 16-50mm lens during Holy week (Semana Santa) in Lorca, a town close to where I live.

K20D + grip + AF540FGZ flash + Sto-Fen Omnibounce diffuser. All at ISO 800 and most, if not all, at f4.PP'd in Lightroom 2.

Lighting conditions were far from ideal with at least two different temperature street lights and a bit of flash. The use of a slow'ish shutter speed presented more than a few challenges. On the night, I shot 248 frames over 3 hours. These 178 images are the best of the bunch and were taken primarily to show off the embroidery of the numerous garments worn during the processions.

I hope these images, whilst not perfect, give you some idea of what this lens can produce.

The background looks to have a lot of noise and the subject is not in focus. As you used flash, did it really need ISO 800?

This was also taken very late at night, perhaps a daylight shot would yield a better image.

In the words of Frank Carson, "It's a cracker". Get one while you still can.

Editing in Lightroom is non-destructive. Originals remain unaltered.