Any would be nice but if I was in New Zealand, that sunken garden would have little appeal. I love NZ it has so much to offer & I want to be off seeing it again! No doubt a similar feeling would apply to seveal of the other spots too.

They look like they could be dust on the sensor (though I thought raindrops first given your earlier comment) It's just the sort of background that shows up sensor muck, and it may have been removed already by the ultrasonic camera system. None of the other shots have a plain enough background for it to show.

A cracking set as always, anyway!

When I said shake I meant movement relative to the car. Gwing's reply explains it much better than I did.

It looks to me like shake rather than focus.
Not having witnessed your technique I can't rule it out but I suspect its mainly a matter of practice & the high failure rate normally expected with panning.
I've been practicing panning for years and still get quite a high proprtion of failures.
Checking the EXIF on the panned images I have in the gallery here & on Flickr I've managed some sharp ones at 1/90s (150mm and 340mm focal length), and in some places got good background blur at 1/180s (270mm). My record is probably https://www.pentaxuser.com/photo/take-off-21525/large 1/20s at 170mm.

I do remember other shots where one end of the car is sharp but the other shows considerable vertical movement. I think this was down to a bumpy section of track as the worst ones were all from the same area.

Generally I find the inside of a bend works best to shoot from, as this keeps the cars nearer to the same distance throughout, and catch fencing is often less of an issue too.

Mannesty's technique tips are all good, I'd just add twist at the hips to follow the cars (unless you're using a monopod).

With the 'DA Tele zoom' it looks like Pentax might finally be getting some affordable 300+ glass. Seems to be roughly 130-370mm and not listed as DA* so not likely to be in the same price bracket as the DA560!
My Bigmos will probably continue to do for me, but this is a range there have been many moans about over the years.

I've used AShampoo regularly.
Much better than the windows burner, and as it was free well worth the money!

Try pressing the 'A' key when in the viewer.[/quote]Thanks! This gives a full size image, I've not noticed any difference in dynamic range, but the GF2 is limited there compared to the Pentax DSLRs.

This is a common problem partly caused by systems that allow the number of decimals to be fixed rather than the number of significant figures.

At work our Chromatography data system allows me to fix the decimal places, and to cope with small peaks I need to use 5 decimals, yet some people record all 5 religiously on large peaks. 97.10367% is effectively 97.1% or 97%, but 0.00017%, is significantly different from zero.

With focal lengths I can't see a decimal is useful at all till you get below 10mm

I wasn't keen on either of the versions of Pentax's camera utility that I've tried, Raw Therapee works well IMHO and it's free (I need to upgrade the version I have on this PC to support the GF2, but I think K10 support has been i it for years - I first got it for K100 RAW).

I've found Faststone will read the RAW files from my full spectrum converted Panasonic GF2 but it's only extracting the embedded JPEG to work with not using the full data of the RAW file (Image resolution is way down).
Perhaps it's doing the same here - which would negate any advantages from RAW.