I tried that in HeliconFocus but the results were not great, I think it was because the software needs to identify sharp edges and there aren’t sufficient here at the different focal planes. In live view the focus peaking didn’t work either for the same reason so I used minimum aperture and guessed the steps but it came out less clearly than a single shot.

I really enjoyed Grayson Perry’s Art Club, now sadly finished, but featured some wonderful participants in this lockdown show. The guy is a natural presenter with his infectious enthusiasm, I wish it would become a regular. And any evening is complete with Montelbano, young or current, a feast of visual delights (including the stunning Italian actresses!), delightful characters, humour and pathos all mixed up with nicely complex cases.

Playing around today with the sun shining through a conch shell.

I know what you mean John about fiddly straps, I spent a fruitless hour trying to attach the strap to a Leica and just gave up, buying a wrist strap instead.

I mentioned earlier the Peak Design system which I have found very flexible. Two clips are fixed on the camera for easily attaching and removing the standard neck strap or one can be used for a wrist strap. A third is attached to the foot of a 150-450mm lens via a PD Arca Swiss plate so one end of a strap is clipped on the camera and the other on the lens, I use the more heavy duty PD strap for this and can sling it over my shoulder. The plate is neat and compact allowing the lens to be mounted on a tripod at any time. This means the weight of the lens isn’t all taken by the mount and with the lens foot rotated 90 degrees it hangs quite snugly against my body.

Horrible experience! I was in a bird hide once and had rested my camera with a big Sigma attached on the little shelf when someone next to me opened the flap and sent them crashing to the floor - timber luckily and just the very faintest of marks.

The Peak Design clips are a godsend as I am always taking the strap off and putting it back on again. For a while I used a wrist strap - never hold the camera without something - but have gone back to a neck strap most of the time as it is much easier to change lenses or filters in the field. The wrist strap is handy though for when you have just the one lens and are walking around snapping as in street photography.

I had accumulated quite a long list of subscribes on YouTube but have recently culled almost all of them including Cameraville. The equipment review sites in particular get obsessional with pixel peeping and worrying about how fast focusing and frame rates are and I have realised that in reality very little of this actually matters. I recall one point he made comparing a Pentax and others with long lenses for birds in flight shots and he noted that although the K1 had the slowest frame rate and allegedly inferior autofocus the results showed it had more keepers because at faster frames per sec the tracking autofocus couldn’t keep up. This highlights the difference between results on paper and use in the field but also the increasing reliance on equipment performing a given task. My preference now are those channels and magazines concentrating on the art of photography rather than technique and technology; as an analogy I think of enjoying a walk in the countryside rather than how I got there, the car did its job and I have been driving for so long I don’t have to concentrate on how I change gears and steer. That’s how it should be with photography.

Thanks all for your kind comments. Gwyn I defer to t’internet on plant ID, this meadow salsify is also known in the US as Jack-go-to-bed-at-noon apparently which is rather a mouthful. I know the goat’s beard you mean which is a garden plant, I have no idea how this plant got its names. I shall have to investigate it’s culinary properties, might as well get some practical use out of it as well as photographic.

It's that time of year when the "weed" Salsify or Goat's Beard sets it's seed head. I far prefer it's more ragged and coarser appearance than that of the dandelion; last year I did a couple of focus stacks so this time I thought to try a different approach using a much shallower depth of field.

I don’t think so. However he is comparing raw dng. files from the K1 with whatever files a 36mp Sony with the Tamron export without seeing how they post process and which could give very different results.

Well done for making the cut.