Yikes! I have just come back from the seaside on the South Coast and there was NO CHANCE of me having a dip... it looked absolutely freezing!

I hope your 10-24 survives ok - I am not sure what I would have done... maybe cleared the water out as you did and then left it in the airing cupboard? I remember recovering a soaked mobile phone that way once.

In terms of a 'proper' waterproof camerabag, that is something of a holy grail I think. I use a couple of lowepro AW bags and have found them pretty good (worked fine through three days of tropical storm, although I did 'double bag' the stuff inside the bag just in case) although I imagine their water'proof' technology is the same as you had on your slingshot. I did find this website:

link

which looks promising...: Alternatively, I carry some cheap plastic bag 'rucksack liners' which I can use if the weather gets really bad.

I use both RAW and JPEG, although pretty biased towards RAW. With my K5 I always use RAW; I enjoy PP and see it as a part of the image-producing process as a much as capturing the original scene via the lens and sensor. It allows me to counteract any of my 'on-camera' inabilities - e.g. to get an ideal exposure/composition/whatever, which is fine with me. However, when I use my optio compact I can only get JPEGs out of that - in general I think the results are very good but I'm still not happy with them straight out of the camera. I can imagine that if I were a professional photographer then I would want to minimise time spent on PP where possible, but I can't imagine eliminating it altogether. I am not professional so thankfully I don't have to worry about it... I just do it for jolly

Regards

I have found similarly that the plastic 35mm is a great lens, but I have also found that you can get purple fringing with high contrast areas. It is a lens issue I think rather than a sensor one. The junction between the edge of the rocks and the light sea behind is just such a high contrast area with PF potential. I would suggest zooming right in and seeing if the slight fringe is magenta or cyan (or similar) in colour. It can be easily removed in PSE by selecting that specific tone of magenta/cyan (use the 'dropper' to select a specific pixel) and then winding the saturation of that colour right down. As long as the pic doesn't have too many pixels those colours elsewhere then this makes for an easy fix...

Hope that helps?

Hello all. I was recently fortunate enough to have bagged one of the £67 DA35s from Amazon (with many thanks to the forum members here for flagging the bargains!). I have to say I am very impressed with it. It is plastic and amazingly light, so light that it rather surprised me when I unpacked it. But it is also really sharp and works really well wide open. Colour rendition is excellent and it focusses very quickly on my K-5. I doesn't have quick-shift but all-in-all I think it is an excellent package (especially at that price). It focusses pretty close. I have seen some purple fringing with high contrast scenes (trees against a bright sky) but easy enough to fix in PP.

I took the opportunity to try it out last weekend on a ramble around the crabtree plantation, and I haven't taken it off the camera yet. Thought I would post a selection connected inasmuch as they are all pictures of the ground (I am forever looking down for some reason)... apologies they're not very christmassy

1. Muddy Puddle's Edge



2. Mossy Logs



3. Lenses on an Oak leaf



4. Winter Leaves



5. Frosty slates



Hope you like these, any C&C welcome. For anyone on the lookout for a new, affordable 'standard' prime lens then it is hard to see how this lens could be bettered.

Hello all. Has anyone else seen the latest copy of 'Outdoor Photography'? There is a supplement this month showing the winners of their annual Outdoor Photographer of the Year, and it was gratifying to see that two of the winners were using Pentax kit. Great pics too. Don't know if either winner is on this forum but it was good to see a change from the usual dominance of Canikon...

Regards

I agree with everyone else - great shot and a beautiful creature!

Well done

It's very hard to know without seeing a picture. Are you able to embed the result of your test shot? There could be a range of aspects which affect the ultimate quality of the picture. Lens quality is one, but also the shutter speed (camera shake?), ISO, aperture size etc. To do an objective test I would mount the camera stably (on a tripod) and take a shot at low ISO either using remote release or the shutter delay function (to minimise risk of camera movement) throughout the aperture range and see what the results are. If you have (or can download) a test chart for the subject of the pic then so much the better.

Hope that helps!

Hi Amama. Have you tried taking a similar scene with your 18-55 at all? - to see if you get the same outcome? I think there may be a couple of contributing factors - the first is that a lot of the lights around there are in fact bluish - especially around the London Eye, and that gets reflected on all the water etc... My guess is that the blue tint on the left side of the boat in the foreground of pic 1 is caused by reflections of the blue lights on the London Eye on the opposite side of the river. The 'white' lights hanging along the edge of the embankment in the background look more or less white... Secondly the white balance setting in the camera can be adjusted either before shooting or (if you shoot RAW), after - it might be worth having a play with that to see if you end up with a result which you are happier with. Finally, if you are shooting JEG and have PSE or similar, there is a tool which enables the removal of a colour cast which you can also try and see what happens:

Hope that helps

John is right - the lens is a rectilinear one. I have the DA15 and really like it, especially as it is so physically small compared with other wide angle lenses. Here are a couple of shots taken with mine which might help illustrate - the first of which is broadly comparable(ish) with the zenitar shot above - taken with DA15 on a K-7:

St Patrick's Cathedral



Three ways of crossing the Atlantic



Classic NY



Hope that helps (a bit)