Don't worry Tyr, I can't make it fly either. Once by shear blind luck I got 58m, but really not sure what I did! most of the rest of the time it either drops straight onto the floor, flies a few feet in the office or gets chopped up by the ceiling fan.

The beamer also nearly got me, but the background gave it away. Bokeh felt "wrong".

interesting that we all seem to have got different ones wrong, my mistake was the closeup of the back end of a car, though the Corkscrew very nearly got me.

9 out of 10 here as well, some of the CG is VERY good though. There was only one which I looked at and thought "no, that is clearly CG".

I think it would be easier with higher res images.

physically there's no reason I can think of why a polariser wouldn't work, certainly for the near IR anyway. It may not give the same effect you expect though, depending on the polarisation of the IR light.

good point

presumably (and I'm assuming here as I've never even activated the scene modes on my *istDL2), any adjustments made would be reflected in the EXIF data so you can see what the camera did later on? Can anyone confirm this? (I'd do it but a friend has borrowed my *ist and the K10D has no scene modes).

This is how I learned what little I know about photography:

My first camera was (and still is) an MZ-7, which has the same auto-picture mode as the K100D.

In the beginning I just left the camera on AP mode and clicked away. The algorithm which works out which scene mode to use is amazing, it is almost never wrong. That doesn't mean to say that it's better than you can be, but it's good enough to know what you're shooting and make what it thinks are the sensible choices.

As my interest in photography developed, I began to watch what the camera was doing. At this point it was still in full auto mode, but now I was watching what it did and learning from what worked and what didn't. About this time I joined my first online photography community and began to learn more from what I saw there (note, when I post a photo for sharing or critique it always has the settings with it, because this is where I learned a lot of what I know about achieving certain effects)

Here I made my first forays into the "creative" modes, Av, Tv and M (in these days of DSLRs, P now counts too since it gives more control over colour, sharpening etc).

To begin with I did this only when I disagreed with the cameras selection, but as my confidence and knowledge grew still further I stopped using the "dummy" modes altogether.


It may not be the best way to learn photography, and I am certainly not the best photographer in the world, but that's how I did it. The scene modes get a lot of bad press from the experienced photography crowd, but I think they can be a useful learning tool if used correctly.

if Pentax follow their usual mode of operation, the next model will be a K10D with scene modes, no Hyper modes, only one control dial and a limited buffer. It will replace the K100D.

I have no more info than anyone else, this is pure speculation, but it's the way they usually go about things.

the sayins "if it looks too good to be true, it probably is" is more litterally true in Photography kit than almost anywhere else.

cool, I'd like to know where the reviewer found a AA battery grip though.

Is it really too much to ask for these people to check their facts?