You wouldn’t be happy if your car or your windows leaked in that time, what’s the difference? My Leica binoculars have never leaked, my German watch has never leaked (no batteries). If building and engineering structures leaked in such a short time there would be legal action before you could blink. It’s down to good design, quality control and durable materials.

If I buy a weather-resistant product and look after it properly I expect it to stay like that for a very long time, not just four years or less!

Sorry, I didn’t want to sound negative, and I am sure the Mk II is another great camera, but I am doubtful now of spending £450 for the upgrade as it stands. But knowing me I could think differently next week!

Thanks again for such kind comments. To follow up I sent these to the factory as a thank you for the display, and received a lovely reply that the ground had been seeded with wild flowers but even they had been taken by surprise at the result. Also received an invite to visit so it will be great to see inside this little gem of a building.

The DP Review advises against the upgrade as it claims the K1 gives better images, both in noise reduction performance and jpeg colour rendering, so the improved AF comes at a cost. The comment above about Mk II only upgrades has already materialised so it would seem that the 2 year old body will not get any more, a real setback. It would seem the impetus to Pentax given when the K1 was launched has suffered at the cost of marketing gimmicks rather than building on real improvement. I know this contradicts what I said elsewhere but it is a real concern unless Pentax can launch Mk II upgrades to rectify the problems.

Absolutely! We forget, or take for granted where Pentax is far and away better than the opposition. On another thread I explored multi exposure; all the settings, ME options, white balance etc. can be accessed directly from buttons rather than trawling through the menu every time so much easier and quicker to set up. Plus, a brief google shows that Nikon for instance can merge up to ten images with two options; the K1 can merge up to 2000 images with three options! Add to that the ability to use delay each time and delete unwanted images as you go. Multi exposure is just seen as a gimmick but in my thread I show how it can be a really useful tool for specialist work. No doubt other features like interval shooting are equally superior so maybe we should be exploring what our cameras are capable of rather than whingeing about perceived shortfalls.

One of the issues with photographing interiors is when exposing for the internal conditions the views through windows are very overexposed. Also you quite commonly use a wide-angle with which a single flash doesn't cover well. Online tutorials get over this with multiple exposures including one with a fill-in flash merged and messed around with in layers in Photoshop, which I don't use. However the K1 has multi-exposure mode with RAW output of the finished file so I have been experimenting with this, and for the best results so far I have used the following settings with the DFA 15-30mm:
Mount securely on a tripod and use remote control, in manual exposure set at ISO 100 and f11. Focus and switch to manual unless you are set to back-button focus. Select multi-exposure average, in my case 3 exposure at medium speed. For white balance select multi-auto so that different light sources are given the same colour temperature. For the first exposure select a speed to expose the outside correctly, say 1/200, and attach a flash - in my case I had two attached, one AF-201FG on top the camera and an AF360FGZ II in my hand pointing to the right and both set at 1/4 output. For the second exposure I just pointed the handheld flash to the left so covering the whole field. For the last exposure both flashes were switched off and the speed slowed until the interior was exposed correctly.

In previous experiments I found with only one exposure matching the outside and two or more for the interior the averaging meant that the outside was still rather overexposed and strange artifacts appeared where blown areas had not merged well with normally exposed part. It occurred that even with just one flash I could take multiple exposures and just point the flash at different areas each time, avoiding the need for carrying lots of lighting to a location.

In this experiment the lens is pointing downwards to get more of the outside in view otherwise a horizontal position would eliminate the perspective distortion.

Having got the combined exposure about right I edited in Lightroom with the usual tweaks, reduced shadow and the green exposure and here is the result:



PS the downloaded image has come out rather unsharp but the original jpeg is pin sharp.

A beautiful evocation of England, unspoiled by wind turbines and photovoltaic farms, espoused by poets. Let’s pray this corner at least avoids change and development.

Sorry folks, look at when my earlier message was sent! Got confused with the 70-200 f2.8 which would have been a real bargain!

How lucky are you to have such dramatic landscape within reach!