Cret

Thank you very much once again John, for helping me with some information quite some years ago now. It was very kind and very much appreciated. Wish you a thoroughly happy, long, and healthy retirement.

It's an utter disgrace imposing this, then stating it's going to increase each year. Just another indicator of the government inability to address their own follies and take responsibility for their positions of trust, in 'looking after the island' instead of looking after themselves. Disgusting. Yet another household cost that has to be found from somewhere, while wages aren't rising but every other fecking thing gets more and more expensive.

Danger5 And Haven't laughed so much for a while.

My weapon of choice is a Formatt/Hitech 150x100mm 4 stop (ND1.2) soft grad. I've tried a lot of different ones but that's the one I use the most. Sometimes I still end up using bracketed shots because even with this there's too much difference at times, but it brings things a lot closer to being what I want in most cases. Other times I don't use one at all. I kind of just like using them but I do find it a very very useful piece of kit.

I have used that yes, but I find Lightroom a bit of a faff & prefer photoshop. You can do the same thing in photoshop too. But as I say if the raw file doesn't contain the info to start with the those functions won't help. It's one thing to say that a "well exposed" image will be ok with that, and that's definitely right to a point, but frequently there's just way too much dynamic range to get away with that. In particular with the like of sunsets/golden hour the land can be very dark from no direct light (depending where you are), but the sky still very bright, and no way in a lot of cases you can capture all of that in detail from a single exposure without using an ND grad. That's why I like them so much. Sorry if I'm not explaining it well or something. I know what i mean.

You can't necessarily achieve the same effect digitally as using an ND grad in terms of exposure balance unless you combine separate exposures. That's kind of swings & roundabouts in terms of faffing around. Maybe to a slight degree by adjusting the exposure setting on a raw file as three or more separate files then using HDR or combining layers to get a balance overall exposure, but you can only do that to a limited extent dependent on the level of contrast or dynamic range in the shot. Raw is good but you can only get away with so much, ie if your shot has a burnt out sky then nothing can get that detail back afterwards since it wasn't captured in the first place. If you use a grad though there's a much better chance of the whole pic being a balanced exposure with detail in all areas of the image. Yes there's alternative ways but it's down to preference as there are pros & cons to each. I prefer to use ND grads (not all the time obviously), and to sometimes bracket to get the best of both worlds. The only grads I use are ND ones, so I'm only really talking about those here, but you are right that simple colour grads can easily be added in afterwards in post.

I concur I think. Sure I recall as a beginner thinking his site had useful info, but as I progressed realising that there's a lot of downright bullcrap on there. It's things like this that make him sound pretty dumb as far as I'm concerned:- Re' grad filters: "Geeks love the square and rectangular filters because they love to move them up and down. I hate these, because by the time I get the filter and filter holder put together, my light has changed." Then: "Screw-In Grad Filters I use these. They screw in and rotate just like a polarizer. No, you can't adjust them up and down, but you don't need to. Since the filters are usually smoothly graduated from clear to gray, their exact vertical position doesn't matter." So it doesn't matter about not being able to move a grad filter vertically eh? Absolute crap. With a soft grad there's some room for it not being in quite the right place but not with a hard edge one. Aside from that, these circular grads tend to be a 50/50 split between upper and lower half of the filter. So this means the rule of thirds gets flushed down the toilet if you use those unless you want to use the grad inappropriately and have it cover not just the sky but the land/sea you're trying to balance it against. I know you can crop etc, and that you shouldn't follow rule of thirds that blindly and so on, yadda, but in general this sort of stuff he's spouting is nonsense. As for complaining that square filters take too long and make him miss the shot, just about any photographer knows to try and arrive somewhere early and be prepared. It takes seconds to use these things so he must be a bumbling oaf if they're that much trouble. Maybe he uses jpegs because every image he does is picture perfect first time, and never ever needs to have a run through any sort of editing. With memory/storage so cheap these days, is there any downside to shooting in RAW?

Not keen on a lot of what Ken Rockwell says personally (nothing to do with being a canon user! ), but I've found his reviews inconsistent on a few times with basically what the rest of the world says about specific kit, and he rants a bit much from what I can recall (says me!). Your site looks really nicely set up by the way Steve.

Hmmm, having looked into this cabling thing for Sata I'm afraid I'm not convinced there is any need whatsoever for new cables unless the quality of the current ones I have is poor. All the information I can find suggests that there is absolutely no need at all to replace the sata cables to support sata 3, except that if it's a particularly low quality connection then you might not get the full 6gbps from it. Interesting thread on it here: http://forum.crucial.com/t5/Solid-State-Drives-SSD/SATA-III-cable-C300-UD7/td-p/11339 Includes a couple of people doing tests using both Sata2 cables and new cables sold as Sata3 and getting no difference in speed between them. That's not to say it's not possible you can encounter a difference but I think that'll only occur if the current cables are substandard, and that by & large this is mostly marketing given that the people who make the rules and stuff about Sata state that new cables are not necessary generally.

Thanks for clarifying all that. Won't be getting any extra discs for a bit as I'm skint now. Stuff about the memory doesn't surprise me really. These machines are already going to be silly fast so I can't really see that a small incremental increase in speed will amount to a noticeable difference. Kinda surprised about the sata cable thing though. I seem to recall seeing on Wikipedia that the pinouts were the same for sata3 as sata2 so not sure why a different cable would be needed but maybe it didn't actually have that after all. Presume the new C300 drive will run fine on a sata2 cable (either in a sata2 or sata3 socket) but just not get full speed data transfer?

Cheers - my old 3ghz pentium D is getting a bit creaky now and it's buckling under the strain of zillions of programs that have been added/removed over the last few years and some relatively heavy image editing at times, so it seemed time to treat myself to a bit of an upgrade. Nothing to do with seeing the speed my mate's iMac runs at with an i5 in it at all... I was wondering what kind of supporting mods are necessary to overclock this to a reasonable level, not because I have a need to but out of curiosity in case I find the need in future. I've only bought the OEM cooler for it for now as it was about £4, but with the intention of hopefully getting something quiet in future once I have time to research stuff like this. That said, not sure there's a point when it'll have about 4 other sata HDDs in it besides the primary SSD. It'll make a din whatever I do probably. One question I haven't been sure about is the benefit of decent ram over cheap stuff. I've just bought 8gb of Kingston Value ram for now and I'm sure that would be more than ample for my needs but is there a real benefit to buying much pricier stuff (ie assuming the speed of it is the same)? Another question (daft one I suspect) is about the cables for Sata3. From what I can see, it looks like Sata3 uses the exact same connectivity as earlier Sata stuff and is backwards compatible, meaning this board that has 4x Sata2 and 2x Sata3 connectors effectively has 6x Sata2 sockets, 2 of which can handle the faster 6gbps traffic with a suitable drive (like my SSD). I thought I'd read the other day that you need better/different cables for Sata3 but I think I must have imagined it now given that it all seems to be the same as the older stuff....? I'll have to get a nice USB3 storage key as well now that I'll have a machine that can make use of it!

Thanks - I ended up going for a little future proofing so here's what I got with proceeds of some stuff I flogged (including a lens which went for £110 more than I paid ): i7 2600K 8gb DDR3 1333mhz Crucial C300 Sata3 128gb SSD Gigabyte Z68AP-D3 (B3) And I'll transfer other bits over from existing machine as required. Should be lightning fast for my needs and all the stuff I've read about this C300 SSD is very promising in terms of its performance, being Sata3. Not doing any gaming, but quite a lot of photoshop so it should perform pleasantly with this little lot, and give me plenty of headroom for overclocking in future or adding a separate gfx card if need be at some point without having to do a new build at all. Should see me right for a long time hopefully.

Hmmm, actually it looks like in general the Z68 will support onboard gfx but not sure how to know for sure. Board I'm looking at getting is this: http://www.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=3863#sp Can't see on their product pages but it might be a case of not seeing the wood for the trees! *edit* Bah - seen via a product compare that it doesn't support it, and indeed (somewhat obviously now!) has not video output sockets, which is a bit of a giveaway now.

Seems there's 3 different chipsets for boards with this socket. H67 allows use of the CPU's onboard graphics, but no overclocking of cpu, just gpu. P67 allows overclocking of cpu but no onboard graphics can be used (which the core i7 cpu has) Z68 allows overclocking of cpu AND gpu It would look like the Z68 would be best and give the most flexibility but I can't find if it allows you to use the onboard graphics of the CPU, and that's one thing I want. I know most people will recommend a separate graphics card but I don't really want one (can't afford a decent one either), and have no intention of playing games really on this machine. Anyone able to clarify whether Z68 boards can use the i7's built in graphics features to avoid me buying a gfx card? Many thanks!

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