that is a large spider!

I have seen the front legs of one which might have been larger, but neither she nor I was very much inclined to stick around and get to know the other so I never saw her full size. I'm not generally particularly scared of spiders, but when you start to think to yourself "I wouldn't need a glass to catch you so much as a mixing bowl", I tend to consider discretion to be the better part of valour.

Spending the following 3 days surveying a house with holes all over the floor and ceiling, boarded up windows and no lights, with the certain knowledge that there was at least one house spider the size of your outstretched hand floating about wasn't too much fun though.

nice shot btw, very nice capture with the babies in view as well

when you say 1:1, do you mean on CCD or on screen?

if the latter, remind me not to come to Wiltshire in future, that would take the prize for the largest spider I've ever seen and I thought I'd seen some biggies working in abandoned houses!

edit: sorry, the grammar on that last sentence is appaling, I was working in the abandoned houses, not the spiders. Although I imagine the spiders would contend that they were working there long before I turned up.

this is only true of the JPG, I'm pretty sure if you're shooting RAW it wont matter, although the embedded JPG will have to either be rotated or re-generated.

it could be argued that it is better to turn the camera sideways and make full use of that lovely 2.5" screen rather than have the image rotated and only use about 1.5".

After all, with save rotation switched on but display rotated switched off the image will still come up the right way round on your PC.

My guess is on hitting the bottom button the camera does a very quick and dirty rotate on the JPG preview image to show you what it will look like, then when you hit OK it does it properly. Also saves it doing the rotate multiple times (since every rotate will degrade the image a bit if its a JPG).

you have missunderstood the meaning of the rotation custom functions (easily done, so did I to start with)

Automatically rotate images refers to Playback mode. When it is turned off there is no rotation in playback mode, but rotation info is still saved (so the shots come up in the camera detected orientation on your PC)

Save rotation info is the one you are looking for. When it is turned off the camera does not save rotation info on shooting but you can still put it in manually (provided Automatically rotate images is switched on).

Really I am begining to think someone at Pentax has a special relationship with God, and borrowed his camera for a weekend before designing the 10D.

hit "ok" after you rotate the shot

theres a half shot roll in my ME-F which I keep forgetting about, but thats only been in there 4 months (*istDL2 went in for repairs and I went retro for a while)

just a thought, would a piece of insulating tape over the 7th contact on the TC solve the problem?

Thanks for the comments guys, yes it is more or less the full frame

Actually yes we have, this is the best shot of the Orion nebula we have got yet




this one is 8 frames at 20 seconds each, unfortunately the mount wasn't aligned quite perfectly so the stars are a little stretched in places. Here Registax really helped because of the faint detail in the cloud. We have since improved the method of aligning the scope and just waiting for the chance to try again.