Shot 5 really does it for me... quite an unusual view.

What a wonderful story, great to hear something positive for a change! It also shows what can be acheived by not immediately going on the defensive.

Edit - can we see the pictures?

Looking to buy a replacement polarising filters - a 52 and a 67mm one. I have heard it said that it is best to go for a more expensive, main brand filter (rather than the plethora of £3.99 ones on fleabay) but is this truly correct... bearing in mind I am an amateur on a budget... Anyone willing to recommend a cheap option?

Of course, optical quality is important, but build quality is not especially - I have heard the cheap CPLs can split, but am likely to scratch, lose or break it before that happens lol.

Thanks!...

Mike, have you picked up your Sigma 24 and 28s recently? Why not give them a whirl, at least!

This thread is a great place to start: link

ME Super seems to be well regarded, very nicely built (all metal) and a very cheap option... but there are many options, all of which are pretty good! I had a P30 - all manual, bit basic, but solid - and you can pick one up for a tenner!

I love layers in a cloudscape, so I prefer your second.

These are from the same part of the sky, taken a few minutes apart:

Hmmm... how very... reasonable! It would just be lovely if reasonableness was a more common attribute of the Heritage Police, given the details of this case. A polite request to wrap things up in five minutes might have been all that was needed.

Of course the law applies to our actions when in a public place, its just we have become accustomed over the centuries to being able to perform social and recreational activities within the public realm [and I am talking specifically about places like Trafalgar Square created specifically for the informal recreational use of the general public] with a reasonable degree of freedom, coupled with a consensual sense of duty to the freedom and enjoyment of others, without the necessity of intrusion by long arm of the law.

I think for many of us, this sort of thing [not being allowed to take photographs because of a perceived terrorist threat] is just depressingly symptomatic of how we are no longer trusted to work out for ourselves how to behave in a responsible way and are under suspicion by default, and how every single possible risk, no matter how minor or unlikely, must be eliminated at all cost no matter how our sense of freedom and independence are infringed.

A strange experience, picking up holiday pics from the lab - a blact from the past. I used a Pentax P50 borrowed from work while I was on holiday in Cornwall, as my K200 hadn't arrived. I got the pictures processed and put onto disc at Tesco - only £2 if you don't have any prints done! Some of the shots needed PP work so I'm glad I took that option. Unfortunately there's no barrel distortion correction on my work version of PP, and these were taken on my 17mm lens:













(I had to knock back the highlights in the water in this shot. Compare unedited version: link)




There was a lot of dust and blobs on the scans, unsure whether this was from inside the camera or perhaps the assistant dropped them! The film I used was Reala 100. Noticed a fair bit of grain, especially in the sky.

The technical stuff can be learnt along the way, the emotional/artistic side can not. However a desire to express yourself, without the technical ability to do your ideas justice, can be very frustrating; so gaining a reasonably sound technical footing from the start is very important.

Re the emotional side of photography, I found Paul Hill's 'Approaching Photography' fascinating and enlightening on the psychology of image making. link