I installed Mac OS X 10.6 snow Leopard on my daughter's £200 Advent 4211 (MSI wind clone) and it quadrupled the battery life from when it was running XP. I know that sounds an exaggeration, but it really made a huge difference. It is certainly good enough for a traveling laptop to store pictures on.

This has probably been discussed a thousand times, but this thought has just entered my head and I thought I'd better mention it before it swiftly leaves.

If I am taking a shot of something in the distance, on infinity focussing, does the aperture still effect how sharp the image will be?

This is so alien to me. I'm used to downloading an application that works on a mac, not ones you have to build yourself.

I got virtual box and ubunto running fine, when I try to install pkremote I have to install something called GTK! and libglade first. I downloaded the first of these but it's another that I have to compile first and for that I need something else, which I need to compile etc, etc.

The extent of the instructions are: 'Build by typing 'make'

I assume this to be in terminal and I know how to change directory to get there but when I type make it says something about there being no make file.

Never mind.

Thanks for the suggestion. I'm going to give it a go. Fingers crossed...

I know Pentax remote assistant doesn't work on the Samsung GX10 but I've found a piece of software called PKremote which does work. Trouble is, it's a Linux application and I'm running Mac OS X

I'd really love to get the remote capture working for time lapse, stop motion projects. Does anyone know how to recompile a linux application for Mac?

Inspiring. Really very, very good.

If you're a student on a limited budget then Pentax or the Samsung clones are a good choice. I'm a total noob to DSLR myself I've only had my Samsung GX10 a couple of months(identical for all practical aspects to the Pentax K10D). So far I'm loving it.

With the Pentax mount you can buy really old lenses very cheap; they're manual of course but wouldn't that suit a photography student more? I've been a bit mental on fleabay and bought a few cheapo lenses. How about a 28mm prime lens for £1.70? Think you could get one of those for Canon/Nikon?

Plus.. You've got the amazing image stabilisation built into the camera body, with canon/nikon you have to spend more money to get that in the lens.

A good example was today, my work overlooks Manchester United's ground, there were some workmen on the roof so I asked a work mate who has a canon to zoom in with his 250mm auto focus, stabilised lens. I used my £20 manual Tamron 210mm. Ok, he did zoom in more obviously, which would make it harder to get a steady shot, but my shot was in focus, his wasn't.

If you're stuck for cash but still fancy a Pentax then look at the Samsung clones, they go for much, much less than the Samsung versions.

To lighten the bird I just added a 'levels' adjustment layer and brought out the shadows and midtones a little. Using adjustment layers is good because you can go back to the file and tweek it as much as you like without ever damaging the original.

Removing the branch isn't dificult with the patch tool, you just have to use the cloning stamp to paint in a little sky over the branch where you want to cut it. The patch tool works best when it has clear area to go over. Otherwise you get some bleeding of darker colours into the patched area. Infact, you can see a little bit of that around the end of the new break in the branch. (I did it laying in bed on my laptop just using the trackpad)

Finally I just used the clone stamp again, sampling from the paler parts of the branch to make a new break.


...and by mirroring, I meant that the bird in the background is sat right at the end of a branch and by taking out the extra bit of branch, the bird in the foreground is like a mirror image of it; albeit bigger and in focus.

I hope you won't mind my comments; firstly it's a great shot, but I think the branches to the right of the bird are distracting. It would also mirror the bird in the background.

I'm not sure if this is the done thing on a photography forum, talking about retouching, but in my opinion it would make a great photography an even better image.

[IMG]http://i48.tinypic.com/sfl0mt.jpg[/IMG]

I went this lunchtime. Too much to absorb in the short time I had. As I suspected they don't allow you to take photographs inside the exhibition, but you can elsewhere in the Museum.