Once again, thank you Nigel.

Kind regards.
Philip

Thank you for viewing and commenting, Nigel. It was a beautiful day yesterday, with intense sunlight and clear air. I see what you mean about number 2 - perhaps 10% should be cropped off the left side. You request some wide shots, so here are two 16:9 crops from the 3:2 images:

5. Towards the sun:



6. With the sun behind:


The hill beyond is Ivinghoe Beacon.

Cheers.
Philip

Hello Nigel. Another good set from your K-7, although for my taste they are perhaps processed a little too dark-contrast and saturated. I prefer the more natural look of number 4, but even there the green of the moss looks rather powerful. Do you think that number 4 might benefit from a squarer crop to remove the blurry foreground? - Perhaps start with the tracks placed in the bottom right corner?

Cheers.
Philip

Today I went to see the windmill at Pitstone, near Tring in Hertfordshire, which others have shown here before. These are a few photos taken with the 35mm Ltd on a K-5IIS:

1. The windmill:



2. The sails:



3. One sail:



4. A sail shadow:



Cheers.
Philip

Nigel, thank you for that interesting information. However, if a JPEG was accidentally recorded with the wrong settings, and/or the result looks a bit problematic on the rear LCD screen and histogram, and it is not possible to re-take that shot, that is one of those few occasions when I would just press the AE-L button when in the preview to record the Raw file, and adjust it in ACR later.

Cheers.
Philip

I like the symmetrical wide-angle composition of #2, but not sure about the unusual colours (perhaps convert to mono?) and the halo around the tower and trees.

Cheers.
Philip

It is certainly true of the large high quality JPEG files from a modern Pentax DSLR. If you set the camera to produce output images close to what you want, there is still plenty of scope for tweaking the JPEG (which usually takes little time) in computer software, to give high quality full-screen images and/or 300 PPI (pixels per inch) prints.

A few important points about using JPEGs :-
always keep a copy of each original JPEG file - do any PP work only on a copy of the file;
finish the PP on an image before saving the file - repeated saving during PP can degrade a JPEG image because it compresses it a bit more each time;
save the new image with the highest JPEG quality setting - i.e. the lowest compression.

Cheers.
Philip

Well done, Stan. Wonderful photos - that 1st place shot is fantastic!

Cheers.
Philip

That's a good result, Phil, from a nice lens - which version captured this image? The first one I got was the SMC Pentax-A 28 which is great. However, last year I was fortunate to find on eBay an SMC Pentax-F 28 2.8, which is an accurate auto-focus lens. I think any version of the 28 on a Pentax DSLR will make a relatively compact and light-weight standard combination of good quality.

Cheers.
Philip

This guy appears to have one -

link

...but then he's always different!

Cheers.
Philip