Don't praise Wex too much. Their showroom is dominated by the main two as well. Pentax is relegated to one small glass cabinet (albeit next to the counter) amongst a sea of Canikon.

I have set up a basic studio in my garage and wanted to practice light control.

I bought this saki bottle about 30 years ago in Japan and it seemed the ideal candidate. Muted colours, plenty of fine detail, a shiny finish and an interesting shape.

The bottle was stood on a black acrylic sheet, stood if front of a black paper backdrop. To the left was an Elinchrom D-Lite 4, about 4 feet away, on minimum power shooting through a softbox and a scrim held next to the bottle. To the right and behind was another D-Lite, on slightly higher power shooting through a masked softbox to provide the fine edge light.

Camera was a K3 with a DA 100 macro set at ISO 100, f5.6 and 1/160 sec.

The image was tweaked in LR4 (curves, clarity, saturation and a touch of local exposure adjustment) and finished in PSE 12 using the spot healing brush to eliminate a few dust specs here and there.

In total about 2 hours worth. Sad init?

Anyway all C & C welcome

"The story of the hashtag begins sometime around the fourteenth century, with the introduction of the Latin abbreviation “lb,” for the Roman term libra pondo, or “pound weight.” Like many standard abbreviations of that period, “lb” was written with the addition of a horizontal bar, known as a tittle, or tilde. And though printers commonly cast this barred abbreviation as a single character, it was the rushed pens of scribes that eventually produced the symbol’s modern form: hurriedly dashed off again and again, the barred “lb” mutated into the abstract #. The symbol shown here on the left, a barred “lb” rendered in Isaac Newton’s elegant scrawl, is a missing link, a now-extinct ancestor of the # that bridges the gap between the symbol’s Latin origins and its familiar modern form. Though it is now referred to by a number of different names—“hash mark,” “number sign,” and even “octothorpe,” a jokey appellation coined by engineers working on the Touch-Tone telephone keypad—the phrase “pound sign” can be traced to the symbol’s ancient origins. For just as “lb” came from libra, so the word “pound” is descended from pondo, making the # a descendent of the Roman term libra pondo in both name and appearance."

from “Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols & Other Typographical Marks,” by Keith Houston

There, it's Latin which means that we can all hate the Romans. After all what have the Romans ever done for us?

Can we talk about the photos now?

This is me, taken today with my new K3, in my converted garage studio

Cheers Ronnie. I'm assuming that with a broken camera and a defective lens, the next calamity will befall one of my flashes

The only caveat to all this joy is that when I put my 16-50 on the new camera it wouldn't focus. Several minutes and attempts later it finally 'woke up'.
The next day, same thing. So it looks like my SDM is failing.
The lens is just over a year old and bought from SRS so it looks like a warranty job

Well done that man . Unfortunately no prize though

The K5iis is still away being repaired (lack of spare parts apparently). However my wife was fed up with my twitching, nervous shakes, hot sweats and general grumpiness so she packed me off to Wex and I am now the proud owner of a shiney new K3.

I would have preferred a silver one but couldn't stump up enough cash for the camera/grip package (I'll get the grip later). So it's a plain old black one for me. Still its the insides that count.

Nope

Nope

He says with a big grin