My suggestions:

1. BBQ & discussion at KP Cliffs followed by city shots from the top & then a walk along the broadwalk to do shots of Old Customs House and other buildings. I think week night might be better - may be too crowded on the W/E - but I'm flexible.

2. Pre-dawn KP shot. At this time of year that means being set up ready to shoot by about 3:50am. It will be light just after 4am. Can be on either week day or W/E.

Sounds good but not something I'd consider for a while. Too much else going on at this time.
Thanks.

Ash, I understand your situation and did not expect you to be available. I wish you well for you soon-to-arrive baby.

Hi Dan,
Thank you very much for organising the Australia Zoo day last week. Anne & I enjoyed it and will be starters again in the future for other gatherings.

However we can not committ to KP at this point in time, we have family coming up for Christmas and with work & house committments it is all a bit uncertain at the moment.
I will watch it (KP) along and if the opportunity presents.....maybe.

Thanks again.
Grant

it's a pain being in toowoomba at times i'm close enough to know where everything is (and want to go there) and yet far enough away that travel times make it a pain to get there.

apologies also for missing out on the zoo. Work came through for me but a situation at home meant I couldn't come

Rohan

Rohan wrote:it's a pain being in toowoomba at times i'm close enough to know where everything is (and want to go there) and yet far enough away that travel times make it a pain to get there.

Ah, but when we have an inland meetup, you'll have a travel advantage. So suggest some locales...

Dan.

I'd be interested, particularly this week. I'll be working every day but can do an early morning or after work.

OK, I'll PM you with my phone number so we can organise.

Dan.

Graham (GingerBeer), Brett (Zak) & I had a meetup at the top of KP cliff on Thursday 17 Dec from 6.30pm-8pm.

Graham is just starting out. He has a K-x & the kit lenses at the moment, but I loaded him a A50/F2 to use for many of his shoots and he also tried manual exposure using the M50/F1.7.

Brett has a K200D and a nice selection of lenses and other gear.

I brought my K20D & used the M50/F1.7 and ISO 100 for all shots.

We arrived just a little too late to get the sun setting. My first two shoots had the sun 1/2 down behind the buildings. I would have preferred it a bit higher. Here is a shoot with it fully down, taken using a Hoya GND filter. This is not an ideal time either as the building lights had not yet come on. The bridge also was not lit up, but this may have been a blessing as the bridge spotlighting is quite powerful.

1/350s, F4, GND, 6:40pm.

Here is my best shot for detail and I liked the clouds. A slow-moving ferry (blurred) was in the bottom, so I've cropped it.

6s, F5.6, 7:29pm.




It was also interesting that, with a 6s exposure, the stars were no longer pin-points, but arcs, due to the earth's rotation.

The guys noticed that the nice blue in the sky disappeared after a while. Looking at the timings, it seems that the blue is there up until about 50-60 mins after sunset. Here is a later shot:

10s, F6.7, 7:43pm.

Finally, here is some detail of the top of the buildings from the 7:29pm shot:




If you want to see the detail in a 100% crop, click on the link below. On Firefox & modern versions of IE you can zoom in on a image that is bigger than the screen.

http://users.on.net/~dosdan/20091217%20KP%20Cliffs%20meetup/detail%20full.jpg


Thanks GingerBeer & Zak for coming along. I think we all learnt something new that evening.

Dan.

Hi Dosdan,

I had a great time meeting both you and GingerBeer. I hope wecan organize another in the next month or so.
I have tried to add a few of my photos. 1st is Pentax K200d withSigma 10-20 4-5.6 @ 30 seconds and the second is with a 50 1.4 at 30 seconds. I have a few more on flickr (photozak2009)

Regards,

Zak (brett)

Nice shots, Brett, both here & on Flicker. I noticed a spot on the K50/F1.4 shot. Is on all the shots with this lens? You can clean this up in PP. If you don't have a program that does this, look in the Post-Processing section of the Articles database, where I've posted a tutorial to fix this in The GIMP.

In my case with my K100D Super, the problem arose when I changed lens in very light spotty rain & I don't keep the camera opening vertical so a few rain spots got on the sensor & dried. After fixing the spots in PP a few times, I bought a Pentax O-ICK1 sensor cleaning kit & cleaned the sensor surface.

Dan.

Thanks guys. I learnt a lot. I was also much happier with the shots from the 50mm prime than with anything from the kit lens.

Picasa Web Albums - GingerBeer - Kangaroo Point

Graham, the kit lens should be relative sharp at F8. Try the 45 degree newspaper AF test. Perhaps if it is a case of BF/FF.

Also you may find this interesting:

https://www.pentaxforums.com/forums/pentax-dslr-discussion/46793-moire-patter...djustment.html

Dan.