Definitely no argument. If I can't win it, I ain't in it.

George's information is almost certainly more complete/accurate than mine. My posts related only to the compatibility of your lenses with the K10D and were more along the lines of "There's only one way to kill a mole . . . "

I didn't even know what MTF was until recently . . . even now . . . I've forgotten. (I just looked it up) In simple terms, I think it means that when a camera body is set to choose the sharpest aperture, Modulation Transfer Function (MTF) is used to determine it. The aperture chosen will correspond to the lenses maximum resolution/sharpness capability, which differs at different apertures. Put even more simply, any lens will have a particular aperture that can resolve more detail than it can at any other setting. The lens will have some kind of MTF map inside it and the camera uses this information to select the aperture it needs to produce the sharpest result possible . . . I think.

More info here .

If that isn't enough info, George'll be along in a minute with the defacto standard definition

PS: If you really want to avoid an argument, start putting spaces after your punctuation.

I'll bow to your (always) superior knowledge George.
I may have summarised my description biased towards the OP's confusion/misunderstaning/'doesn't have a clue' about his lenses and the KAF2 mount. They'll work fine.

Regards,

The only difference between the KAF and KAF2 mounts is an additional two contacts inside the lens mount. This was added to provide the power for the power zoom lenses. On digital bodies it'll be used for SDM power to the new SDM equipped lenses.

If I can be brutally honest, you have not chosen an ideal macro subject. You could have taken this pic with almost any non-macro lens.

Macro is about making small things look big, revealing detail that you would not otherwise see. That cannot be said about your subject.

A first macro subject would be a slow moving bug, insect, or spider where you can seee the hairs on its head or the multitude of facets making up the compound eye.

Keep practising though.

The FA 50 1:1.4 is noticeably softer wide open than the 77mm. Often a benefit in portrait pics. The effect can be induced later of course.

I can't tell you why there are three, but ND grads are usually described as 'hard' or 'soft'. This is not a comment on the material used but the transition between grey and transparent. The soft ND grads have a much less defined change between the two. In hard grads, the transition is much more abrupt.

Looking at the Cokin site www.cokin.com, I'd say the P-121 is the normal Hard ND8 Grad, The P-121S is the soft transition variant, and the P-121F is maybe 'Fine'. The P-121F certainly appears to have a very gradual change from grey at the top to transparent at the bottom.

If you take a look at the Cokin site, they show the effect that each filter has on a scene.

HTH.

Rregards,

They are one and the same. Unless the comparison is between DNG and PEF formats, both of which are RAW.

If the comparison is between JPG and RAW (PEF or DNG) then that is widely accepted as true. JPG's are so heavily compressed that some detail is ALWAYS lost. Pro's prefer RAW. Minor mistakes in exposure or white balance are more easily corrected if the file is in RAW format.

PEF files use lossless compression so you get more pics per gigabyte on your SD card. Adobe DNG format is saved in an uncompressed form.

If you think about it, how else would the slaves trigger at the right time ? There is no other communication between camera and wireless slave, other than the light from the 'controller' or 'master' flash.

I made so many test shots to decide where the problem lay and I could have misinterpreted what was going on. The fact is, there is a difference between how the 360 and 540 behaves when fitted to the camera, no other flash involved.

One very obvious difference is that the 540 will fire, on-camera, if it is set to wireless slave. With a 360 on-camera and set to wireless slave, it doesn't fire, which is what I would expect. Then again, I might have reached that conclusion when I had my 540 set to slave mode 1, and the 360's set to mode 2.

The other issue that I thought I had, and I will re-test when time permits, is with the 540 off-camera and set to wireless slave mode, it didn't fire when the onboard flash was used as wireless controller. It did fire if the onboard flash was set to master.

A possible cause of this behaviour might have been if I had a 360 powered up and set to slave mode 2. It would have fired on preflash and possibly 'confused' the 540. I need to retest this to be sure.

Incidentally, a wireless controller will produce a main flash but the output is dramatically reduced, maybe even a stream of pulses, it'll trigger the slaves to fire but will not contribute to scene illumination very much, but it does a little.

There was a time when life was much simpler . . . .

Thanks for your help Amoringello. All is now working as expected. Although I fail to see how having the 360's set to slave 2 caused the 540 not to fire from the onboard flash set as a controller.

I had of course checked and double checked every conceivable setting . . . except that one which I'd completely forgotten about .

Anyway, thanks again. Now I can take some pics of my new kitchen .