Just speaking from personal experience. I've posted on many forums over the years (most of them not photography related) and found quite a big difference between many of them in terms of how friendly or otherwise people can be.

Thanks for all the nice comments. To answer your question, it just came out that way but I quite liked the result so I kept it.

To be honest when deciding which photos to keep from any given set I try to avoid being influenced too much by technicalities and just go with my gut feeling. This approach does occasionally result in my showing off an image that most other people hate, but it can also provoke the opposite reaction at times and it keeps things more interesting, at least in my opinion!

I suppose if I ever tried to 'go pro' or semi-pro (something I've considered but only for a long way off in the future as I don't consider myself nearly skilled enough yet), then I'd have to change my approach, at least in the case of paid work anyway.

On the front page of Pentax Forums today:

I have no doubt they are indeed the largest but PU Forum is the by far the friendliest, hands down. There's just no competition.

I must say, however, the Lens Database on Pentax Forums really is exceedingly useful.

You need the UFRaw plugin, however I thoroughly recommend RawTherapee as an alternative. It is not as well integrated with GIMP (it's essentially totally separate, but it can automatically export images and open them in GIMP when you're finished working with the RAW file). However, it has a significantly more powerful feature set which more than makes up for it.

I've been learning to do more and more PP over the last couple of months and getting much better at it. For the moment, at least, RawTherapee + GIMP is my software combination of choice.

http://www.rawtherapee.com/

Note if you have a newer camera like the K-5 you'll have to download one of the 'unstable' development releases of RawTherapee. However, that's what I'm using (funnily enough) and I haven't had any major problems except that it seems to freeze up whilst generating all the thumbnail previews if you try to open a really large folder (100+ photos). I've gotten into the habit of either dividing photos into smaller folders or just opening one file at a time. I imagine this will be fixed when they bring out a 'stable' release of version 3.0.

Wow! Whilst number 2 does indeed stand out I really like numbers 1 and 4. For me the contrast between the shadowed area and the mid section of the photo in number 1 works.

All images lit by the natural firelight from the fires and torches, pretty much relying on the K-5's high ISO/low noise capability to get the exposures. All shot with a fairly neutral white balance setting in order to deliberately retain the red/yellow colour cast from the firelight.

All comments welcome!



One

[IMG]http://i1204.photobucket.com/albums/bb411/msitaylor/IMGP5221r.jpg[/IMG]



Two

[IMG]http://i1204.photobucket.com/albums/bb411/msitaylor/IMGP5218r.jpg[/IMG]



Three

[IMG]http://i1204.photobucket.com/albums/bb411/msitaylor/IMGP5206r.jpg[/IMG]



Four

[IMG]http://i1204.photobucket.com/albums/bb411/msitaylor/IMGP5198r.jpg[/IMG]



Five

[IMG]http://i1204.photobucket.com/albums/bb411/msitaylor/IMGP5083r.jpg[/IMG]



Six

[IMG]http://i1204.photobucket.com/albums/bb411/msitaylor/IMGP5070r.jpg[/IMG]



Seven

[IMG]http://i1204.photobucket.com/albums/bb411/msitaylor/IMGP5061r.jpg[/IMG]



Eight

[IMG]http://i1204.photobucket.com/albums/bb411/msitaylor/IMGP5023r.jpg[/IMG]

Rocker Blowers didn't get a panning at all! He gave the blower brush a panning because it shed bristles everywhere and didn't produce enough force to remove any dust. He went on to say he does use a Rocket Blower.

Personally I have both a Blower Brush and a Rocker Blower. I find the blower brush has plenty of force for removing small amounts of dust from the front elements of lenses as long as you remove the brush first (which is why it's detachable). The brush itself has never shed a single bristle - I can only assume the writer of the article either has a particularly cheap and poor quality example or doesn't know how to use it effectively.

Personally I find the brush more useful for cleaning dirt out of the grooves on the rubber grip parts of lens zoom and focusing rings, than for cleaning actual optical elements. Particularly on my Tamron lens, on which the grooves are quite narrow so you really need a brush to get in there.

The Rocket Blower has a lot more force, therefore is more effective, but it's a bit large to carry around in my camera bag all the time hence the reason I find the smaller blower bulb useful.

I'd be interested to know why you think the Rocket Blower is the work of the devil? In my opinion the only real problem with it is not the device itself but the fact that it doesn't come with any instructions. When using it to blow dust off your sensor it's easy to blow dust onto your focusing screen - or worse, behind it - if you use it incorrectly. If you use the proper technique there's very little chance of that happening. Hence it should really come with some form of instructions - other than that I don't really see a problem with it.

Lovely shots. Put my grey squirrels to shame!

...Or if people are looking for something more adventurous than Edinburgh there is the Highland Wildlife Park up near Aviemore. There's easily enough there to occupy a full day and the weekends of June 18-19 or June 25-26 would suit myself and the wife for that one as we'll be holidaying not too far from the area during that time anyway.

http://www.highlandwildlifepark.org/

http://www.highlandwildlifepark.org/photography_film.htm

One possibility:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-12908149

Dragon Boat Festival, Leith, Sunday June 5th. Mentioned this briefly at the last get-together. If we think of something else to do on the Saturday in or around Edinburgh (shouldn't be difficult) we could even make a weekend of it.