The reciprocal shutter speed rule is meant for obtaining a sharp-enough image full frame - hand-held.

It's only a rule of thumb.

If you have a steady enough tripod you could shoot at 30 seconds and still get an image free of shake-induced blur (but you'd probably have image movement though!)

Beyond that, it depends on how fast the object is moving, how close it is, angle of view of lens, etc etc.

Related closely to the issue of sharpness is the term "circle of confusion" - which is related to sensor size...
HTH!
Matt

Indeed. But if you were intending to crop on film then the reciprocal shutter speed would be too slow as well - just as it would on digital
Matt

George,
There are a couple of very affordable NAS solutions at the moment:
The Buffalo Terastation is great if you need RAID5 (4 drives in one enclosure). Misco do them for around £400 - which isn't bad at all.

Netgear also do a RAID1 device which looks a bit like a little toaster Not expensive and is bought without drives. You just buy a couple and plug them in. Can get the model number if you want... EDIT: SC101 and SC101T (Turbo).

BTW, there aren't problems with IRQs - the IRQs are shared. It's not like the old 80286 days (and prior!).

Matt

AFAIK, the in-camera noise reduction just does dark frame subtraction which takes a second "shot" with the shutter closed and subtracts the noise from the original image.

This helps to lower the noise and hot pixels, but as George rightly says you can do a much better job on the PC. The only small thing worth noting is that the noise will vary with ambient temperature and the temperature of the CCD sensor and the in-camera noise reduction can help to some degree... unless you take your own dark frame for later subtraction

Matt

They do it by issuing a burst of high speed flash pulses. It reduces the distance by a half, but is absolutely fab for out-door fill in and keeping shallow DoF

Yes, it's via the pop-up flash. A K10D custom option will allow the choice of "Pop-up contributes to the exposure or not". (Mine's on "not".

BTW, the only minor, minor niggle is that you can't do wireless high speed sync (which you could on the *ist-D). But TBH, it's not such a big deal. I find a £30 brolley + bracket on a tripod with the AF360 or AF540 produces a great lighting combination

Have fun!!
Matt

Chris from SRS (on another thread) said it would be in the region of £89 - £99.
Nope.

AF360-FGZ is what you want for the K10D. It's not that big. The weight will be similar anyway with four AA cells. Here's a quick feature list of what the AF360 has that the 200 doesn't:
* Wireless P-TTL
* Wireless Manual flash
* Dumb slave trigger (even for triggering off Canon bodies! )
* High speed sync for shooting all the way up to 1/2000s
* Bounce
* AF assist illuminator

And I've seen the AF360 for £160 at SRS Microsystem
(I have the AF360 and AF540)
Matt

[quote]...can anyone recommend a good book on portrait photography?[/quote[
Depends what kind of portraits you intend to take
But I can highly recommend this book:
The Photographic Portrait - by Robin Gillanders
A really thoughtful and interesting book with a balance between technical details and the psychology of the portrait.

Head and shoulder studio style portraits are one thing... but I love the portraits that convey something more about the person. Keep meaning to practice this type of portrait...
Matt

Don't think it needs to be AJAX... could be just SSI.
But here's a good place to blow your mind on:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajax_%28programming%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajax_framework

Follow the external links, and make sure you've got some analgesics handy
Matt

Other thing...

If photography isn't your main line of work, then register with the IR for self employment (and you can claim class 2 NI exemption if you earn less than around £4k).

If the IR find out you've been selling prints and not paying tax there'll be a lot of trouble

Matt

If you are not VAT registered then the price is the price
You cannot "add VAT" when you are not VAT registered. It's illegal to do so, AFAIK, because if you were VAT registered your customer can claim the VAT back if they are VAT registered too.
Confused?

Bottom line - you just give them the price (and they'll probably realise you're not VAT registered anyway).

Maybe you will have to register... if you carry on selling them like that
Well done
Matt