Thanks everyone for the replies. I do need to practice my panning. I was going to practice by taking pictures of the local dual carriageway, but then I wondered if I might cause a crash as drivers slow down thinking I'm a speed camera!

Last year I went to the same race meeting with a P&S that I was unfamiliar with. It rained all afternoon, so I didn't get any good shots, and missed the one dramatic shot - when a car flipped over (the driver walked away unhurt) - because I had the camera in my pocket I've learned that lesson!

It looks like I'll be taking the Sigma and the kit lens. Let's hope the weather is good next weekend.

Richard

In a couple of weeks I'll be going to a car race meeting, I'm a bit of a novice about taking shots at meetings like this so I am open for advice.

Part of the meeting will be a cavalcade of interesting cars, part of it will be a timed hill climb. I've also got a pass to the paddock so I'll be able to wander around the cars while they are getting ready to race.

So, the question is, what lenses should I take? I have just bought a Sigma 70-300, so I was intending to use that for long distance shots of cars on the track and use my A50/1.7 for closer shots of cars. (Or maybe I should use the 18-55 kit lens?) Then I wondered if autofocus is really necessary for racing cars. I guess I am more likely to focus where I expect the car to be and take the shot - there's not likely to be enough time for AF to work. If that is the case, then I would be better using my A70-210 which is sharper than the Sigma.

Any advice?

Richard

I got the new Argos catalogue today and of course I had to have a look at what they were offering Pentax-wise.

First, of course, they are selling K10D and K100D kits, it sure is nice to see them keep up with the times!

Then I had a look at what Samsung items they had and saw these:

http://www.argos.co.uk/static/Product/partNumber/0582690/Trail/C%24cip%3D1500011801.Photography%3EC%24cip%3D1500011823.Camera%2Blenses.htm

Samsung D Xenon 50-200mm for 170 quid, that's the RRP, but you can get a better price else where. But look at this:

http://www.argos.co.uk/static/Product/partNumber/0582683/Trail/C%24cip%3D1500011801.Photography%3EC%24cip%3D1500011823.Camera%2Blenses.htm

Samsung D Xenon 18-55mm for 400 quid! I wonder how many of those they will sell?

Richard

Actually, the K100D does have a partial dust cleaning system. If you go into the Setup menu and then Sensor Cleaning -> Mirror Up the mirror is raised and the sensor is shaken. You can hear the same high pitched buzz that you get when taking a long exposure shot with image stablisation switched on.

When I see dust on my sensor the first thing I do is take off the lens and put on the body cap, then I turn the camera so that the sensor is down, I then use Mirror Up for 10 seconds or so. This *does* have an effect. If there is still dust on the sensor then I'll repeat it while blowing with a rocket blower. I have not yet had to try anything more because so far I have been able to clean the sensor this way.

Richard

Thatnks, that is a kind offer. I don't intend to do the photographing for a few months (meaning, I am too busy now) so I may get back to you later if I may.

But in the meantime, the Copipod, does it sound like what I would need to photograph the magazines I mentioned (essentially 46x31cm)? And what lens would be suitable - I have the 18-55 kit lens (but I have a 52-49 step down ring so I could use it on the copipod albeit with the danger of some vignetting) I also have a A50 and and A28 both have a 49mm filter ring.

Richard

Thanks, I may get one if it comes up cheap, just to try it out. I cannot find any exact dimensions. The link you gave says that the legs extend to 22" (55cm), so I guess the lens front element is about half a metre from the item. A rough estimate seems to indicate that fully extended the area covered will be about 48cm square, which will cover most of the things I want to photograph. (The magazines are 23x31 closed, so say, 40x31 open.) It does mean that I am restricted in using a copyboard (I wanted to lay some glass over the magazines to keep them open by not put too much pressure on the spine). Also, there is the worry of mounting my nice expensive DSLR on four spindley legs

Richard

I have some 70 year old books and magazines that I want to photograph so I am looking for a copy stand. New ones look pretty pricey considering that I won't use the stand much and they don't seem to come up on ebay that often. However, every day there always seem to be a few enlargers on ebay and I wondered if I could use one of those.

Since I never did get into home processing I thought I would ask the experts here. An enlarger looks like a copy stand with the enlarger attached, so if the enlarger can be removed, how much more would I have to do to attach a camera? Looking on the internet (and using Kaiser as an example) a copy arm is between £20 and £200, so there is a possibility of getting one for not too much money.

Am I missing anything?

Richard

Oh yes, I know about that. My experience of IR is through one of these:

http://www.edinst.com/pl.htm

A PL5, 50W CW at 10um. We used a brick as a beam stop, the place where the laser light hit the brick would glow orange. It would take a lot of UV and old writing paper to get that amount of IR , luckily it used He-N-CO2 mixture and a 3000V discharge to give the population inversion.

(Heh I had a Crocodile Dundee moment with that, someone was playing with a laser pointer and I said "you call that a laser, *this* is a laser...". Well, you had to be there to appreciate it...)

Richard

This answers a question I had a few days ago. I have some letters to my grandfather when he was in a Japanese POW camp in China 60 years ago, the letters are fragile and the writing has faded and is unreadable. A friend suggested that one technique is to illuminate the letter with ultraviolet light and take a photograph using IR film. (I'm not sure how this works, because it would suggest that the UV causes the writing to emit IR.) Apparently it is a forensic technique.

So it means that if I get an R72 filter I will have the IR end of things sorted, and the next bit is to determine what UV source to use.

Richard

I am not surprised that you haven't had any problems. The whole point about 'eject the hardware' is to take into account disk caching. I once turned off a 300Gb USB hard disk without ejecting and when I switched it back on I got a message that it was corrupted (the cache had not been flushed to disk). It turned out that I hadn't lost anything, but it took something like 2 hours to perform a chkdsk on the disk.

In general, you will not be writing to the SD card from the PC, so any caching on the PC will not affect the SD card. So I cannot see why you would have to eject the SD card. But it doesn't do any harm.

Richard