Here in the U.K. stone curlews have become pretty rare, they look almost identical to me but I suppose they are a different variety to your antipodean specimen. Anyhow, an interesting pose and very well captured.

Yes, the “toy” effect doesn’t appeal to me much but there is plenty of scope for experimentation. AP this week has a TS photo of a station with the centrally placed rails sharp all the way but the platforms either side are soft, I haven’t worked that out yet!

I had the same problem, just kept clicking the shutter button and it cleared up. Probably only temporary but so far fingers crossed it is ok. Also worth checking your lens, move the aperture lever on the mount and it should snap back instantly, if not that could be the problem.

These are indeed great shots, especially the timing with the hoverfly. Did you need to crop at all?

I decided to experiment with the tilt function of the 24mm TS Samyang lens, aiming to get front to back sharpness at f8.0. This involves a bit a fiddling between the manual focus and the degree of shift and whilst the lens was pointing downwards it is surprising how little tilt is needed to move the focal plane to the horizontal surface. The depth of field shifts from the vertical plane to the horizontal plane so adjusting the aperture affects how far away from that plane vertically things stay sharp and it makes little difference whether they are nearby or at a distance.


The same shot with a polariser needed a four stop reduction in speed, although I think I prefer the previous one with reflections. And the sharp-eyed amongst you will see that the rectangular pot on the right has suddenly sprouted plants!




and a couple with the 70-200mm f2.8

These are great, with your technique you are really nailing the depth of field here.

Something else about which to obsess over gear! And you get to be a really snappy dresser as well.

I have a nice story about the Lytham course, my son in law is a member so when I visited a few years ago he took me for a round on a Sunday afternoon. Now I am hopeless, don’t even have a handicap and spent most time hacking through the rough. And for a non member to book a round involves a waiting list measured in years, apparently. Anyhow, on Monday in the office a mad keen golfer told me he had spent the weekend watching the Open at Lytham and I told him of my round. You should have seen his face!

I think the reason so many exposures are available is to enable long exposure effects like smoothed water and clouds without needing an ND filter.

Just received documents for my Northumberland trip, which will include multi-exposure tuition. They advise that only certain Canon and Nikon bodies can blend in camera, up to 10 exposures, and one Sony body can blend 2 RAW images. In contrast the K1 can blend up to 2000 images in three different modes, and even the K50 can blend up to 9 in RAW. These are the kind of hidden facilities that never get mentioned in reviews and which make Pentax cameras a bit special.