To a certain extent, the sensor has a "native" colour temperature, that is, the colour temperature which results in RG and B amplifications of 1.

However, this applies just as much in camera as it does in the RAW converter. The RAW file contains the data as it was captured, before white balance was applied. Any settings such as White ballance, sharpness, contrast and brightness have no impact on the RAW data whatsoever, except that they are stored as metadata to be applied later.

In short, taking a shot in RAW with WB set to Daylight and switching to Tunsten in software later will produce PRECISELY the same image as taking the shot in Tungsten to start with, except that you have more options for tweeking the WB in your converter than you do on the camera.

and I am waiting for all your 16-50's to arrive so the bottom will drop out of the price on the 16-45......

well I can hope can't I?

VirtualBox running Windows under Linux is a cop-out, WINE is just a compatibility layer allowing you to run the software you need in the environment you want (for me anyway).


I haven't tried Irfanview, but WINE has improved dramatically in recent years and now seems to run most things as long as they aren't too graphics intensive (note that photos are not graphics intensive, they're just pretty).

I've been playing with RAW Therapee, which feels nice but seems to have some bugs with its exposure module.

UFRAW mentioned above will open anything you can think of, and probably a number of RAW types besides. Its interface is basic but powerful, though I would advise ignoring its NR system and using something like NoiseNinja instead.

It is also quite possible to run Silkypix under WINE on the eee. It's a bit of a squeeze on the small screen, but it does run nicely even on my 2G model.

briliant shot, well done Pete! keep on showing that film can still deliver in the right hands.

Thanks everyone, very kind. Perhaps I'll post a summary of what I use and how at some point.

Believe it or not, Andromeda is huge. It is several times the size of the full moon, hence the reason you can use a relatively short lens (the above is cropped, but not by as much as you might think, full size ~2400x1400). Only the core is bright enough to be naked eye visible, so without a telescope it doesn't look much bigger than a star, but a longish exposure with a fast lens proves otherwise.

I love astro photography, nature does the composition for you

Well it seems my Pleiades shot from last Sunday didn't get to remain my favourite Astro effort for very long. I took this last night, The Andromeda galaxy and two of it's satelite galaxies:




12 stacked 1 minute exposures at 300mm F2.8 and ISO 800.

The polar alignment could have been better, I hope to try again soon and get more shots with a longer exposure time, especially since as of today I have a long enough counterweight bar to ballance the mounting properly! (I was having to adjust the motor speed every 5 minutes or so last night. Man this Tamron is heavy!)

I thought the 35 on the list was a Macro? Though I admit I havn't seen a roadmap in a while

well perhaps I should have been more specific, no mention of professional use was made so I was refering only to optical performance. In that regard my 90mm F2.5 is peerless in my experience, though I admit I have not had the chance to sample a Pentax 100mm (probably a good thing from the point of view of my credit card, optical performance on par or better than my Tamron with AF thrown in.........)

Certainly it's heavy, but bulky I would dispute. It is smaller than my Pentax 50-200. In any event it isn't nearly heavy enough to prevent me taking it more or less litterally everywhere, you never know when you're going to find an interesting critter.

BTW, Clarky, I keep my non-Pentax lenses a good distance from the computer so they can't hear John

all I can say is if my Tamron 90mm F2.5 isn't as good as the Pentax 100, then the Pentax 100 must be truely amazing.

It is possibly true that the Pentax is better, but I honistly can't see a way in which it can be better so you'd notice the difference in terms of the final result.