Good tip, I'll look out for a lens pen. As for touching the front element, I haven't. Not with 'skin contact' anyway - I prefer to avoid having to remove fingerprints by not making them in the first place!

I just obtained the DA 55-300 second hand from a user on this forum and to be honest I could not be happier - it is in absolutely mint condition and looks and feels brand new like it was bought from the store yesterday.

The only one problem is that in comparison with my other lenses the front element seems to attract dust like a magnet. With the lens cap removed indoors it seems impossible to keep it completely dust free for more than a few seconds at a time. I can only assume it has picked up a slight static charge at some point.

I've had a look on Amazon for anti-static cloths but those I found all had customer reviews which stated they tended to leave fibres behind on surfaces, so I'm not sure where to go from here.

I was wondering if anybody has had a similar problem, or any advice about the best way to 'de-static' a lens without causing it any damage? Thanks!

Wow! Amazing shots. I'm speechless.

I might post a couple of others, but they're along very different lines from the one posted here! In any case, I'm planning a similar outing some time very soon because the first one gave me a few ideas to try out.

P.S. Sent PM on unrelated subject, not wanting to stray off topic here.

Thanks, that's the nicest compliment I have had for an image shown on here yet! I think you have some great shots on your site, too.

Thanks Algi, that's useful information. According to the timings I took the picture a bit before the 'blue hour' but I'm sure it must vary depending on atmospheric conditions etc.

Checked the white balance setting and apparently the camera was set on Automatic - which is strange as I could have sworn I had it set manually on 'cloudy' the whole time and most of the other shots from that day show that it was.

However, no matter what camera 'preset' white balance setting I select to apply to the RAW file (I am using the Pentax Digital Camera Utility for this purpose) the sky is still a more intense colour than any of the other shots I took around the same time and place, and the 'Daylight' setting looks identical to the original. Surely the filter must be having some effect for this to be the case?

I'm also not sure why folks are so quick to rule it out considering intensifying blue sky colour is supposed to be one of the uses of a CPL filter. I know I'm a beginner at this stuff so any explanations would be appreciated as they would help me to learn!

Edinburgh is very hilly so perhaps the shape of the landscape tends to occlude the remaining sunlight more. Also I don't know about Norway but it is almost always heavily overcast here, pretty much all of the time for at least 8 out of 12 months (October - May) so that probably contributes too. I assure you by the time I got home (about half a hour later) it was properly dark.

As for 'blue light' my wife is from Australia and she constantly complaints that so far as the sky is concerned, there is no blue to be seen around here!

I did try a couple of shots without the filter and the hue of the sky was visibly more intense with the filter, and even more so than viewing the scene with the naked eye (actually the bespectacled eye in my case) so I'm guessing there must have been some polarised light around... or is it possible that this is just due to cutting down the amount of light as you said? I'm not very familiar with the exact effects of filters as haven't really used them before.

I don't know how much bearing this has on the quantity of polarised light about, but actually it was not that late in the evening. However, any much later around here and there wouldn't have been much light to speak of as the sun goes down like a lead balloon around here at this time of year. Checking the EXIF against the 'official' sunset time (18:11) it was about 6 minutes after sunset (18:17). The clock on my camera is set pretty accurately.

Surreal silliness:


[IMG]http://i1204.photobucket.com/albums/bb411/msitaylor/EveningTreesCPLreflection-r.jpg[/IMG]