Absolutely love it - this shows exactly the sort of 'ideal' that I want to achieve (with some of my shots), which is to reveal what our eyes truly can perceive.Very nice technically, although I do think you should have made more effort in tidying up the church beforehand.

Its a great example of a photorealistic style for HDR, but the 'starburst' effects through the window go well with it too. Were they created in the HDR software also? And how many individual exposures?

Is this using Photomatix Pro 4? If so, is it the Tone Compressor or Details Enhancer? Anyway, thanks for showing this, nice work. Sorry for all the questions, but for someone starting out in HDR they'll all petinent. If anyone's interested I can put an example of mine also.

Sometimes the best approach is to reverse the norm - instead of going out with your lenses and seeing a scene or subject first, then fitting the lens, try fitting the lens first and then going out and finding the scene or subject for the lens (if that makes some kind of sense!)

I mean, stick to one lens and move around and frame shots to suit that particular lens. I shot an indoors event recently with only the 28mm f2.8 fitted - a zoom wasn't even in the bag. I set iso 1600, worked between f2.8 - f5.6 and I was getting speeds of 20th - 90th second. Shot 360 images.

It was liberating to forget about autofocus (all the repressing the shutter button all the time), and just kept on adjusting the focus ring as I moved around the room, concentrating on clicking the shutter at the key moments.

Pentaxophile wrote:
If I had a 5k windfall and had to spend it on gear, my problem would be deciding between the Nikon D700 or Canon 5d ii. Would prefer Nikon really but like the idea of using M42 and K lenses on a FF Canon.

Interesting.....this suggests that a low budget is the primary motivation for using a Pentax body. I also recently just started out with Pentax from scratch (K7 and 18-55WR, £499), in my view an absolute bargain compared feature by feature to the competition. Even though I had some decent Canon fit lenses (for a film system) it was still a no-brainer to switch to Pentax to set up a digital system.

But, honestly, even though the price tag caught my attention, I'd been trying numerous Canon examples, up to the 7D, and there was no doubt that the Pentax just instantly had that 'feels right' factor. I don't think that would change at all just because I had more money to play with.

Good choice - if its the 'a' 28mm f2.8 like I have, then its a great little lens. Looks the business on my K7 with its high quality setting rings and the numbers all around, and a solid build.

I tend to frame a little wider than normal, as the resolution is high on this lens then cropping is no issue - better to have more than you need in the frame than miss something. I have noticed that it provides a very nice soft range of colours, sort of muted shades and very natural tones.

The only negative is that the colour fringing can be a bit severe, mostly a clear / purple fringe, mainly along strongly backlit edges.

Thanks, all good stuff. I'll have a look.

Pentax Camera Utility is the latest 'development' software provided with the camera on CD. It is written by the developers of Silkypix in Japan. I have just started to use this again, and it has its uses for a few specific jobs. But you must go onto the Pentax Website and update to the latest versions, and also I'd suggest updating the firmware of the camera.

In particular PCU is ideal for gaining access to the adjustment parameters (such as 'Natural', 'Portrait', 'Scene Landscape', 'Sharpness' etc). These are presets that can be useful to get the image quickly towards the sort of output you want.

Then you have the white balance settings, and most usefully, you can activate the distortion and Chromatic abberation corrections if not already active on the camera. I would recommend turning these features off on the camera as it speeds up the display of the image on the LCD after taking the picture. You can then apply the adjustments in the PCU software, and tweak them if needed. It doesn't matter if you shoot PEFs or DNGs, all the settings are available equally.

Lets be honest - this Pentax software is clunky and fiddly to use as you have to drag various adjustment panels up and down on top of each other, but the quality of the edits is very high, I think. The highlight reduction feature (which I've seen in Silkypix) is great - allows you to specify whether to recover more saturation or hue when reducing blown highlights. I have not seen that in other Raw Converters.

Thanks, I've got the manual now. With the 'A' and 'K' lenses you enter the focal length on the rear LCD screen when it's first attached, so I guess the flash could receive this info - and so it could set the zoom automaticaly also. And of course the iso would be known also as set on the camera. Just leaves the subject distance - I thought the DA lenses could send this info from the autofocus system.

Algernon, what was that about a cordless meter? I've heard of light meters that give a flash exposure reading, but I'd always assumed them to be of the handheld type - what is a cordless one?

Ok Gareth, fair enough. I guess the 'difference' I might see will be in the nature of the controls - I'm glad you say there are more manual settings on the Metz - this combined with its modern electronic controls should make the experience a bit 'easier'.

So it looks like I'll have to continue to think about subject distance and aperture with the manual lenses. I wonder if the Metz gun can tell the user the aperture to use for a particular iso and subject distance (like the scales on the AF280T? And another thought - I wonder if you can control the flash head zoom manually?

Yes, I really would like to learn more about flash in general, and definately full manual flash is something I will try and experiment with. But my OP was about the amount of time it took (with the manual lenses in conjunction with the older flash unit) get get shots perfectly exposed when there are so many individual settings to manage.

I do think that P-TTL must be a great advantage in situations when there's not a lot of time to get ready before the action has moved on. Even with my DA zoom and the AF280T there's a few things to check and set before shooting. I would like the option of P-TTL if required.

But of course I also want to shoot good flash exposures with the manual lenses, and my AF280T does provide some degree of auto functioning. I was struck by sterretje's suggestion that I might actually lose even this amount of auto control with the Metz unit.I had assumed I'd have more control with a modern gun.

Is it likely that achieving good balanced flash exposure with the manual lenses will be easier on the Metz unit than the older Pentax AF model?

Thanks Pentaxophile, I like that site you linked to, I'm going to have a good read through it, looks clearly written.

One thing about that quote above for the camera club '...8bit jpeg and at a resoution of 72 pixels/inch ((so that entries may be e-mailed)...'

Am I right in thinking that actually, the resolution of the image (72ppi or 240 ppi whatever) will make no difference whatsoever to the file size when it is saved as a jpeg (which can only be 8bit anyway). You could set your image to 200ppi and when it saved it will be the same file size as if set to 72ppi (just that the dimensions will change proportionately).

What is key to controlling to file size (to make it suitable for e-mailing) is setting the compression amount at the time of saving. Am I right in thinking this?

I know we could make our image smaller (resizing it) but we wouldn't do this for the purpose of emailing it - we would do this in order to print it out on the paper size we want.