seconded, I have a cheep but massive Aldi special which cost me £25. It knocks the socks off any mouse for photo editing.

Agreed, I bet most of us would rather spend a little extra to get good service and advice we can trust from a real shop. Trouble is with most shops these days you get the worst of all worlds, no advice or poor advice, little service AND they have virtually no stock so you still have to wait for stuff to be delivered.

There are some shining beacons of how a shop should be run (SRS leaps to mind), but they are getting harder to find.

As usual, it's horses for courses.

If you have the time to use spot metering and the exposure lock, it can work very nicely and is often the best way.

If on the other hand you are taking action shots in a situation where you know you are likely to under/over expose, a little dialed in exposure compensation drastically improves your hit rate in automatic mode.

I don't advocate dialing it in as a matter of course, but it certainly has it's uses.

I haven't been able to find a Linux program able to do the job of Pentax Browser

What I do is

dcraw -e *.PEF

the -e tag extracts the embeded JPG image, which gives you something to look at in deciding which photos to process with your RAW converter of choice. I like UFRAW, which has recently had an upgrade and is now even better than it used to be.

I have come upon a very interesting program for Linux (supposedly for Windoze too, but I can't get it to run under XP)

it's called ImgSeek. At first glance it's just standard photo organiser database program supporting EXIF tags and the usual. It's interface is far from pretty and TBH there are better programs from this point of view.

But wait, imgSeek has a trick up its sleeve. It can search by image similarity. That's right, without any tags or other user intervention, you give it an image and it returns a list of images which are "Similar" to the input.

Unsurprisingly, it isn't perfect in this regard by any means. My Dad takes great offence that it seems to think my Grandmother looks like a Citroen 2CV, but out of 2800 odd images added to the database so far it did manage to choose the only other picture of my Gran in the top 5 hits.

It also has an option for the user to draw a simple sketch and search for photos similar to it. This works surprisingly well, I was able to find photos of Robins, butterflies and cars (and my Gran, who the software still contends looks like a Citroen!).

This is certainly going to be added to my personal arsenal of photo organising software!

I have three basic folders

DSLR Downloads containing my PEF files. This gets backed up.

Photo-Working containing works in progress,

Photos-Done containing finished pics in JPG format.


Under those I have sub-directories by date, named after the event at which I took the pics. Something like a week long holiday might get divided further.

I do have grave concerns about finding certain things long term though. It's not so much the big events, as the little things which get sprinkled in. For example, a much loved Cat died last year, I know I have lots of good photos of her, but finding them is proving to be difficult.

mmmm not totally convinced that would go down well with the other MTB wales members!

I wasn't disagreeing with you per-see Kim, but threads which don't obviously fit in any particular place are always going to end up scattered to a certain extent.

While you are quite correct that a thread about tripods would be useful to people using anything from a spotting scope (Pentax make those too) to a 67, a new member who may be new to the wonderful world of photography is likely to think "I need a tripod for my new dSLR, therefore that goes in the dSLR forum".

It may not be the intended or most enlightened thought process, but I maintain that it is perfectly valid. The person is not being lazy, they are just uninformed.


What to do about it is quite another question. You could argue that we need a Tripods and camera supports forum to give these posts an obvious home, but it doesn't seem likely that tripods and camera supports generate enough posts on their own to require a forum to themselves.

Renaming the Lenses forum to just Lenses, or Lenses for Pentax might help as Pentax Lenses deffinitly implies lenses made by Pentax (for me anyway).

Another point re your assertion that Printing questions don't belong in the General Digital forum, it seems that whoever wrote the descriptions of the forums disagrees with you.


for the record I didn't suggest that anyone actually WAS arguing that we shouldn't talk about non-Pentax lenses, I was just playing devils advocate. I tend to do that a lot I don't mean to get at you, I'm just participating in what I hope is a good natured debate in the hope that it will throw up ideas which will improve the forum for everyone.

This does on occasion annoy me too, but sometimes it is genuinely unclear where something ought to be.

The lens forum for example, is called "Pentax Lenses". You can read that as either "Lenses made by Pentax" or "Lenses for Pentax Cameras". If the former, then where do you put a topic pertaining to off brand lenses?

You could put it in Digital/film SLR because that's what you mount the lens on, you could put it in Digital photography because that's what you plan to do through it, or you could put it in General Chat because it doesn't really fit anywhere else.

To my mind, all are valid, I would probably go for General Chat (In fact I think I did).

You could even argue that because this is a Pentax forum we shouldn't be talking about off brand lenses, but TBH I don't think that's a very sensible position for the forum to take, especially given the current limited range of Pentax brand lenses.

Stans site is great, but it is very out of date these days. It still lists the FA28-80 as "new" and doesn't mention the DA series lenses at all.

I would love to see an up to date version, particularly if it included other lens makers besides Pentax. A Pentax site it might be, but most of us have at least one 3rd party lens and in some focal ranges there is no Pentax option available.