magnification is a very dificult term to quantify, that's a whole different can of worms!

I think you have explained yourself why switching to dB would be a very bad idea. Imagine trying to explain to a newbie why he had to shoot at +9dB with his K-x when his more experienced friend with a K-7 was using +12dB in the same conditions with the same aperture and shutter speed. It's hard enough for people to grasp the black art that is exposure to begin with, without making it more complex.

I agree that "you have to increase the ISO equivalency of the sensor" is a pretty dificult sentance to understand unless you know what's going on, but "you need to increase the sensitivity" works fine whatever unit you're using for that measure.

simply because that's what film is measured in, and there's no particularly good reason to change it.

The true sensitivity of the sensor is given by its quantum efficiency, but this has no useful meaning in photographic terms. Why learn a whole new system when there is one in place which does the job perfectly well?

The most flexible solution would be to have a massive bit depth on your ADC so that you could effectively operate at all ISOs at once and just pick which part of the file to develop as a displayable 8bit JPG. That might get pricey though, and would result in RAW files of truely epic proportions.

with these lenses you won't get Pattern metering, the camera can only do spot and centre weighted without electric contacts. If it's set to pattern, it'll default to centre weighted.

My guess is that you're looking at some pretty small apertures with the lenses you mention. I find that the cameras tend to underexpose when the light hitting the meter gets very low.

Also with birds on the wing it's possible that your background is bright vs a relatively small, dark foreground. This will confuse the metering system and cause underexposure. If you post some examples we might be able to help more from there.

it could be worse, the Gnome could be holding a non-Pentax camera.....

I like the first one and the last one, I love being outside at this time of year!

have you updated the firmware on your DS?

The DS and DL were never officially supported in Remote Assistant, and the firmware update which enables SDHC cards also disables Remote Assistant capability.

do you know where you bought the card from?

I once had a Sandisk UltraII fail (write protect switch rather than electronic) and 7dayshop swapped it out for me no problem. Much easier than sending it all the way to the Czech Republic!

and so MS once again manages finally to catch up with features available to Linux users for several years.....

I wonder if they'll ever realise one desktop is no where near enough.

I don't know, I reckon it might be ammusing to scare Canikon users by out-shooting them with a "toy"....

I'd say it does, although I've been known to argue that tomato ketchup should count so you may not want to listen to me too closely!

Also the difference between a bottle and a glass depends entirely on the size of the glass!

An idea (which I lack the skills to test, but Stefan and Don strike me as the kind of chaps to be better at this stuff than me!)


What if you use a wired external trigger to set the camera off, then split the cable so that you can use some electrical trickery to make the trigger release both the shutter AND the flash.

You'll probably need some sort of delay on the flash trigger, but a monostable or similar with a variable timing resistor should take care of that.