I am a bit confused when you say the K1 doesn’t have edge peaking for live view manual focusing, check the menu because it does. I use it mostly when focus stacking but it is best switched off for night shots.

Well my Blurb book has just arrived from the Netherlands (so that’s why postage was £8.99) and it is looking really good even if I say so myself! I could get a taste for this. It is now left casually on the coffee table, shame we don’t get any visitors at the moment.

A lovely set, I especially like 2 and 4, those red hips really pop.

Thanks Gareth, I was as surprised as you. I have found that exposing as far to the right as possible raises the ISO but noise is less noticeable; luckily here there was no bright sky to affect the reading so the shadow areas were well lightened. Previously I tended to underexpose to keep the ISO down but compensating in post processing really showed the noise up. I processed in Lightroom with minor tweaks, sharpening to 65, masking 10, noise reduction 20. I put a radial filter around the bird and reduced exposure to darken the background and pushed noise reduction to +100 to remove noise from the out of focus background. I compared this with what could be done in Photoshop but that didn’t give a better result.

Well he/she was back again this morning in better light when I arrived at around 8.50 and stayed for half an hour so, and I had the luxury of trying different exposure settings. Slightly further away this time so a bit more of a crop but able to use lower ISOs. When the sun came out the feathers changed from blue to turquoise, doubtless due to their irridescence.

Disk drill
I tried a few a while ago and this gave the best results, but make sure you haven’t overwritten the files first.

Thanks Womble that’s good to hear. The postage for the one item is £8.99 which is a bit steep so for a few there would be cost benefits (CEWE is free above £30.00).

Well I have taken the plunge and sent my file to Blurb for one book to see how it comes out, it was a toss-up between Blurb and CEWE and it might be helpful to explain. In the reviews I looked at by photo magazines CEWE came out as favourite so I duplicated my book on their software, and although they are similar I found the CEWE software preferable and much easier to line up and place photos on the page. The big difference is that Blurb is primarily an online publisher so they will market your book and you set a commission. The downside is if you do that you cannot make changes afterwards unless giving the book a new title, so it is best to get a proof copy first before ticking the “publish” box. As far as I can tell Blurb books are printed by subcontract printers and there are some complaints online about the occasional quality issue and the long time in getting it looked at.

CEWE on the other hand is an international printing company so everything is done in-house, and as a bonus for me the U.K. branch is about five miles away so I could call in person. They don’t however publish your book online like Blurb. Pricing is the big difference between the two: initially they are not dissimilar but Blurb gives a 35% discount for first order, ten books get a 20% discount and 20+ books get a 40% discount so a big incentive if you are planning those numbers of copies. CEWE does reduce the price per copy for larger orders but nothing like the Blurb rates. So if you want just one or two copies for yourself then I would say CEWE is probably a better option but we shall see.

At full stretch of 450mm, f5.6 and 1/500 sec, using the bridge parapet for support. Just before this a goldcrest flew past my head, the little beggar too fast to capture. Thanks for the comments all.

Well not the first time I have seen one but the first time I have managed some photos. After hearing that one was to be spotted by the bridge in the centre of the village I set off as soon as it was light and was rewarded by this chap obligingly sitting nearby. The ISO is eye-wateringly high at 20,000 but the DFA 150-450mm on the K1 performed remarkably well, nailing the focus 8 out of 10 times. The only crop was to chop the sides to make it square.