Having been (mainly) away I missed all the fuss and bother.

Sorry to see you go, Gwyn, and I hope you lurk happily and re-enter the fold when you feel more comfortable again.

I tried a few more general photographic fora before discovering this one, and have stuck with this one since I joined just less than a year ago. Where else would one member send me a lens saying 'pay what you think it is worth when you have had a play' and another member offer me a darkroom set-up for free?

Let us hope we go back to being a friendly group!

Best wishes, Kris.

PS back in civilisation on Saturday!

The only thing I have had repaired which wasn't clearly my fault was my 50-135mm lens. It took over two months. I haven't yet seen the lens to assess the quality of the repair.

All my other repairs have been done 3rd party by people like Harrow Technical.

K.

I am afraid my database is on the other computer at the moment so I cannot help much immediately. You may have more luck splitting them up I'm afraid.

Best wishes, Kris.

You have already got a good price for it. Much rarer than the 500mm lens.

Good luck with the sale, out of my price range already!

Kris.

I have various older primes but the SMC-K 135mm f/2.5 is lovely.

As regards the pic, nice shot but move the lighthouse out of centre, perhaps crop a slither off the bottom, and try to adjust levels/curves to give it more punch as George suggested. The sky, for example, looks a bit insipid as it is but I think there is enough there to make it a bit more dramatic/interesting.

If you are a magazine subscriber you get a discount. I was surprised that the repair to my 50-135mm was only 78 quid after the discount (new front barrel and new motor) but the repair took ages and I haven't had a chance to test it yet as it is back in the UK and I am not.

I like shooting at dawn and dusk, and flower macros, all of which require a tripod. HDR shots of church interiors require one likewise. Having said that most of my photos are shot handheld, and most of my biggest disappointments are because of shooting handheld.

It is, definitely, courses for horses. I don't shoot airshows or do much 'street photography'. On the very rare occasions I have 'done' a wedding I mixed the two. Those big group photos are much easier on a tripod!

I now have four and a half tripods. My crew managed to loose my Manfrotto ball head for my Unilock (Benbo clone). Apparently, it bounced out of the wheelbarrow on the way back from site and no-one noticed! Couldn't easily buy just the head over here so ended up with a new tripod instead.

Cheers, Kris.

I used to shoot transparencies too (in fact still do, I have about 20 rolls of K64 to finish before the end of the year) and my film and digital styles of shooting are very different. Film: look around the image, pick something of about the right tone, meter from it, check for particularly dark/light patches etc. etc.; digital: frame, shoot, check histogram, adjust if necessary, reframe, reshoot, delete first photo. This, of course, works for me because few of my subjects move!

I have no way of proving it, but my gut feeling is the LX light meter seems more accurate than my K10D, and I used the ME Super for so many years I learnt the quirks of its meter.

Back to the OP. (a) using lightroom I am essentially unaware I am using RAW and not jpegs EXCEPT that I can correct imperfect exposure and white balance with fewer problems and (b) I can save presets and apply them or just copy and paste settings to multiple images. In fact, when editing older jpegs I go down the develop module's list of adjustments in exactly the same way so there is no extra steps or extra fiddling, my workflow (to use that horrible word) is identifical for both. If I learnt the quirks of the meter in the K10D as well as I know the ME Super, I would probably be less of a RAW convert like John.

Just MHO. K.

Both lightroom and CS3 have the ability to click and drag on an area of the image and lighten or darken the underlying colour. For example, you can click and drag on blue sky to make it almost black similar to using a red filter on BW film.

Lee Frost did review a BW conversion program he rated even more highly (which isn't in Malo's list) but I cannot remember the name of it now. If only I had my stack of BW Photo magazines to hand...

In Lightroom all the editing is done non-destuctively on the RAW file and the last thing one does is export as a jpeg (or whatever). I don't even really notice I am using a RAW file apart from a greater ability to rescue imperfect files. The only exception is on the odd occasion when I want to do something fancier than Lightroom can manage and then Lightroom creates an Adobe .psd file which I edit, and then I still export the jpeg from within Lightroom. Conversion to BW can either be done in Lightroom's develop module or as a BW conversion layer in CS3. I used to do the conversions in CS3 until I finally worked out how the Lightroom set of tools worked.