Thanks all for your orders & well-wishes
Hope you benefit from the e-book
Matt

Michal,
There will always be situations where you get such purple fringing, unfortunately
If it bothers you then you can post-process to remove the PF. There are some free Photoshop PF removal actions around. My suggestion (especially in this instance) is:
* Create a new layer in PS
* Change the layer mode from "Normal" to "Color"
* Get a small paintbrush, at 50% opacity
* Alt-click on the blue sky or branch
* Paint on the purple

You could use the select color range to pick up the purple automatically.
HTH!
Matt

Dave,
Check the contacts on the *ist-DS, and make sure the flash has been push on all the way.
Everything should work fine (I have *ist-D, *ist-Ds and K20D and they all work fine).
Otherwise sounds like the *ist-DS needs fixing
Matt

Peter - there is no problem when the flash is on HS. The flash will automatically switch between HS and non with no problems at all.
The problem occurs when you don't have HS selected on the flash
Hope that clarifies it!
Matt

You can download manuals from the Pentax website -
http://www.pentax.co.uk/en/Photo_Downloads.html

http://media.pentax.co.uk/downloads/photo/en/19541/K200%20manual.pdf

Matt

As the problems are with the AF540, maybe your AF540 has an intermittent fault?
Have you checked that it's on "Slave 1", and the correct channel?
(ie P-TTL slave. The "Slave 2" mode would still partially work as a dumb slave.)
Not sure what else to check
Matt

As far as the exposure goes - they look good.
However, a couple of technical "niggles":

1) The first has a blue/red CA on the edges of the rock. It may well be Photomatix and the "HDR halo" going on - the lower left edge of the protruding rock has a bright halo.

2) The second has some serious purple fringing on the tree to the right in addition unnatural looking clouds top right. This is likely down to Photomatix and "HDR halo" again

Often you will need to manually blend in a "regular" exposure in Photoshop to make it more natural and iron out the issues that HDR can bring. That step doesn't take long, but helps a lot in producing a natural image:
* Load the HDR result into Photoshop
* Load a suitable regular shot and place on a layer above the HDR shot
* Add a "Hide All" layer mask to the top layer
* Pick the gradient tool (in "Foreground to transparent" with opacity around 20%, white as foreground) and stroke on the mask to reveal the regular shot
* Tidy up with a soft white & black brush set to opacity 50% (white = show; black = hide)

They could also do with a touch of sharpening for web

Just keep practising!
Matt

Dave,
The wireless P-TTL works something like this:
* Pop-up sends a signal burst of light to the flash
* Flash responds with a test burst
* Camera sees remote flash and calculates exposure
* Main pop-up flash fires and remote fires.

Problems with wireless are normally down to:
- Remote not "seeing" the pop-up flash (check the front red area of the flash)
- Camera not "seeing" the remote flash.
- Ambient light too bright (and "hiding" the synchronisation flash messages)

Hope that helps (a bit!)
Matt

I borrowed the 77 for a couple of hours and it's a sheer delight
The engineering is sublime and the image quality stunning.

However, I wonder just how much different it would be to the 50-135 (which I understand is stunning as well!). Certainly more compact, but personally I think I would rather have the 50-135.

Matt

Just for completeness:

Windows:
http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/product.jsp?product=106&platform=Windows

Mac:
http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/product.jsp?product=106&platform=Macintos...

It's the "DNG Converter" you need. It is a standalone application that can convert a batch of RAW files into DNG. You have the option of:
1) Compressing the resulting DNG file.
2) Attaching the original RAW image inside the DNG file for archival purposes (so the application can use the DNG but the original PEF can be available should you ever need it)

Matt