Lee, step away from the hacksaw!

I assume since you have had some success with your sawing that you have found the custom functions which allow the camera to fire with an M series lens.

Now, here's the clever bit

you have 3 options

1) leave the camera on automatic, this will meter correctly and shoot without stopping down the lens, so you always get wide open. I guess you have found this already. It's useful on occasions.

2) set the camera to M mode, and press the exposure lock button to activate the metering. The camera will stop down the lens just long enough to take a reading, set a sensible shutter speed and open up again.

3) set the camera to M mode and activate the DoF preview (on the ON switch, past the on position). The lens stops down to show you depth of field, but also activates metering so you get a normal manual mode meter readout and can set shutter speed accordingly.

These aren't perfect by any means but I hope they will be enough so you don't feel the need to mutilate your poor old lenses! after all it's not their fault.

Oh, welcome to the forums from a fellow target shooter btw, what do you shoot? I am mainly into sporting rifle and air/black powder pistol but I've dabbled in most things at one time or another.

sorry my spelling is wrong, I meant Hugin

it's a frontend of Panotools, designed for lining up panoramas but can be set to output the files separately rather than blending them together, so you can use the output in whatever you want.

I have used it with success for hand held HDR and stacked astro images, as well as its intended roll of panorama stitching.

It's not the worlds easiest piece of software to use, but a little work produces the best panoramas I've yet seen and the level of control means you can press it into service for other things too. Very handy, and available for Windows, Linux and MacOSX. I've used the Windows and Linux versions and both are more or less identical so I guess the Mac version will be the same.

as a point of interest, HDR is perfectly possible without a tripod, you just have to use Huggin or similar to line the photos up before you blend them. One more step in post, but one less thing to carry in the field.

Of course if you have a tripod with you anyway it's worth using it, but for those "mmm that would make a good HDR" moments it's a good trick.

nice shots, especially like the first one.

to me the sun being blown doesn't matter, the sun will always be blown, and here it hasn't taken too much sky around with it. It might have turned out better if you'd shot RAW since this would have given a little more flexibility in how blown highlights are handled, but it's great as is.

The foreground makes up for any shortcoming of the sun 100 fold. I agree the ND could have been higher up the frame but even that doesn't worry me.

I very rarely buy software, but that's because most of my software is GPL'd, it's all properly licensed.

If you want free software, switch to Linux

If you want Photoshop, take out a mortgage.

good point, I'd forgotten about that.

The K10D rocks

I have even left SR turned on when attached to a Newtonian telescope at prime focus, which I later figured out was stupid since the direction of motion of the camera had no resemblance to the direction of motion of the image(it was cold, and late, my brain wasn't working properly!). There was no visible degradation (although there was also no benefit, as you might assume).


With my K10D I leave SR on more or less all the time, but on the other hand I shoot hand held most of the time too so perhaps I just don't notice?

With the RAW vs JPEG debate, it is my opinion that there is no reason to shoot JPG unless you are short of space. With the prices at 7dayshop and Picstop there is also little reason to be short of space. If you shoot all RAW and decide that in fact the camera was right in the first place, you can batch process the RAW files using default settings and the Pentax software. You end up with the JPEGs you would have had anyway, nothing is lost.

meanwhile, if you shoot RAW and the AWB gets it's knickers in a twist, or you forget to switch back from Tungsten to Daylight, you can easily correct this mistake in post processing.

There are two disadvantages to RAW.

1) you must process the files before they can be universally viewed, so you can't take pictures at your mates party and download them to his computer before you leave unless you brought the Pentax software with you.

2) The files are larger on card than JPGs and less of them will fit in the buffer at one time. This is the sole reason I ever shoot JPG, if I am short of storage space or fancy some really long bursts (the latter has never yet happened with my K10, 9 shots has always been enough).

I think the ideal sensor would be the 4/3rds one, it's a slightly different aspect ratio but the same 2x crop factor as 110 film so probably close enough for the lenses to cover it. If I was Pentax I would have at least looked into reviving System 10, even if only for the bragging rights of "smallest DSLR" (stick that one in your pipes and smoke it Olympus!).

I thought for a while about trying to bodge a sensor into a 110 film cart, but decided it is beyond my abilities and quite possibly isn't possible at all due to the thickness of the CCD.

no, it's not just you

what I'd really like would be a digital back for my Auto 110, but that's even less likely

be thankful you chose a Pentax. I looked through a Nikon D70 once and almost had a claustrophobia attack.