Hello all. I have had this week off work and been out and about taking pics. Issue now is finding the time to PP the gigabytes I have accumulated. On Monday I took a wander to Kew Gardens and here are a few pics. All in mono (I have a thing for mono pics at the mo), although there are others (and colour too!) on my flickr if anyone is interested...

Pagoda



Palm House (you'd never guess this was on the Heathrow flightpath...)



Cactus cluster 1



Cactus cluster 2



Cactus flower



Princess of Wales conservatory



Swan touchdown



Heron



Hope you like these. Any C&C welcome as ever. Once I have PP'd the rest of this week's expeditions I'll post some more installments

Regards

You could try using the remove colour cast tool in photoshop or PSE; or, to simply remove magenta tones, you could select the adjust hue/saturation tool, pick 'magentas' and wind back the saturation. Obviously you may need to do some nifty work with layers or similar in the second case if there are things in the picture which are supposed to be magenta...

It should work fine I think. I have used a kenko 2X TC with my 100mm macro before with no problems. The 2x TC will cost two stops of light, but that still leaves you at f5.6 which ought to be fine for autofocus. It will probably cost a little image quality as well, but it ought to still give good results. Best bet would be to see if you can try one out with the lens before buying perhaps.

Regards

Certainly Pentax tubes seem to be very expensive. Are you looking for tubes which are wholly manual or are you looking for some with contacts to enable the auto-metering, and even aperture control. The latter seem to be very expensive. I have a single manual pentax helicoid extension tube which I picked up in a second hand shop which is good quality. I have also seen SRB-Griturn tubes (link) recommended on the forum in the past as well but I have no experience of them myself...

They get a wow from me too - the last three especially have a really special look to them. I assume these were with the 250-600mmm??? Fantastic results - really well done

Regards

Thanks Tim

+ (another) 1 from me

Regards

Thanks very much folks for the kind comments

Regards

My immediate thought was that I might interpret the 'no-PP' to mean that the image has to be produced only in the camera rather than having any manipulation once extracted from the memory card, but then i remembered that the K-7 (and I guess many other cameras) have a range of PP functions built in (filters.effects etc.).

Therefore perhaps a no-PP image is one which only uses the capabilities of the camera and any 'variables' (i.e. brightness, saturation etc.) which can be changed are set before the shutter is pressed; for an old-fashioned film image, a straight and unmanipulated scan:

Just my thoughts. I too find it an interesting idea, and a good, challenging one as well - especially for those (like me) who tend to use PP to a degree on almost all kept images.

Regards

I love the ducks too!!! althoughI like all of these. second fave would be chocks away - I take my hat off to you though for capturing the swifts in flight. I find these guys just SOOoo hard to snap (hard enough to follow just with my eyes let alone a camera...); I guess you use a pretty wide field of view and then crop the image:

A good set

Regards