My lens buying addiction (LBA) and why it stops now!

I haunt eBay looking for lenses at reasonable prices. I have bought several at great prices over the years since I got my first DSLR.

Many sit, unused, on a shelf. Many have been sold. And, yes, a few were unusable due to fungus, scratches etc.

I use, in no particular order, a Pentax 55-300, a Pentax FA43mm Ltd, a Pentax 50mm manual lens (25 years old and still producing great image quality), the Pentax kit lens 18-55mm (non Weather Resistant version) and until recently, a Tamron 70-300.

I needed (wanted? lusted after?) something wide, something medium, something macro (truly macro, not just close-focusing), something long, all with image quality to die for - well, don't we all?

So I was thinking, which are the most respected lenses in those classes for a Pentax camera? And which , of the ones I selected, were the ones I could afford?

Here is what I came up with:

Sigma 10-20mm F4-5.6 EX DC Lens - wide angle, made for digital with a great reputation (for those examples that work properly!)
Pentax 18-55mm F3.5-5.6 AL WR - wide to normal, weather resistant. It's the default kit lens, but it is a good lens from f4 up, far superior to other kit lenses out there.
Pentax 50mm F1.7 - a "nifty fifty" normal that is, even after 25 years, one of the top 50mm pentax lenses ever produced.
Pentax 55-300mm F4-5.8 - short telephoto to long(ish) telephoto - a lens that always punches above its weight class.
Sigma 70mm F2.8 EX DG Macro - macro and 105mm equivalent (it's designed for full frame cameras).

I did the maths, took a heart attack at the total price, then logged onto eBay, and in an orgy of selling, made enough money so that I could add just a bit and get the missing lenses from my line-up.

I chose the Sigma 10-20 over the Pentax 12-24 F4 because it was £160 cheaper and scored only marginally less in reviews. I was concerned over the reports of "dud" lenses (not sharp across the lens, back focusing, front focusing etc.), but when I dug into it, I found that the vast majority of reports were years old, and it is a known fact that Sigma are trying much harder these days.

The 18-55 kit lens is weather-resistant, a good lens and a good all-rounder for urban areas (and I already owned it).

The Pentax 50mm is a superb portrait/ normal (75mm equivalent in full frame terms) and produces excellent image quality - and I already owned it.

The Pentax 55-300mm is a great all-round lens when there is plenty of light, and can be a great walk-around lens. It is relatively cheap, being a consumer grade lens, but it does have excellent image quality - and I already owned it.

The Sigma 70mm has, in most peoples opinion, too short a working distance for insect photography, but that's ok, as I don't particularly want to photograph insects - I like flower macros which don't move (and don't bite or sting, either!). it is also a noted portrait lens with superb sharpness and colour rendition. It has review scores marginally better than the closest Pentax equivalent (the DFA 105mm Macro).

All in all, I am pleased with the spread of these lenses, the usefulness of them all, and the image quality of them all.

So my LBA stops now. Really. I mean it. No more!

Here are some macro shots of household items using the Sigma 70mm - and one of a "normal" shot.

For those into setups, here is the setup used to photograph the household objects:

Natural light only, from the window at the left.

A comparison of two purchase experiences.

New Item - Purchase one
I needed a new chair for my computer usage. I am 18+ stone and hard on furniture. So when I was working for someone else I would buy what are known as “operator chairs” - chairs that are specifically manufactured for 24/7 use by corpulent computer cowboys.

Now I am at home, it was time to replace my 7 year old “office chair”, so I started looking for suppliers who sell operator chairs. My usual supplier that I had used for many purchases was out of stock and had a backorder notice with a 2 week delay noted on the web site. Not to worry, there were at least three other suppliers on the search page.

I chose 925 Furniture arbitrarily, and proceeded through their fairly pedestrian web-site. It was a bit worrying that there was no indication of stock availability, but I thought “Hey, they must not advertise a product when they are out of stock” ‘cause anything else would be really silly, wouldn’t it?

So I completed the sale. I received two emails, one which said they would be in touch asap about my order and one from SagePay, their third party payments processor. All good so far.

Skip forward to Monday afternoon. I have not heard from 925 Furniture, so I gave them a ring. Their lines were busy. I called back a little later. Chatted to someone who took my details (order ID, name, phone number) and said they would call back with the stock situation.

Two hours go by. I called again. I gave my details (name, phone number) and was told that they were waiting on a call back from the supplier ( I thought they were the supplier, but I guess I got it wrong…). Within 15 minutes I had a gentleman call me back to tell me that they couldn’t release the chair because they had redesigned the arms and they needed me to approve that change. I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt and say that they probably would have contacted me that day, although by this time it was after 4pm. The gentleman assured me the chair was in stock and would go out asap on their standard delivery (which is buried in the terms and conditions on their web site and is stated as “2 to 3 days”).

Fast forward to Wednesday. I have had no tracking number, no dispatch notification - in fact no communication from 925 Furniture at all. I phoned and got the same person as last time ( I gave the details - again - and was told someone would ring back. Hmm…. ).

Two hours later, I had heard nothing from 925 Furniture. So I rang them again. I got a different person this time who said they couldn’t help me, and he would “take my details”. I am afraid I lost it a bit at this, and gave the guy a controlled blast describing the woeful track record of 925 Furniture with regard to this sale. Give the guy his due, he was professional, said he would make sure something was done and that someone would get back to me - and I had to give my details - again!

Some time later a gentleman did call back to say that the chair was being dispatched that day for delivery the next day, and that they deliver up to 5pm, but if it wasn’t there by 2pm to give him a ring and he would look at the tracking information. When I asked for the tracking number, he didn’t have it to hand, but did offer to get it for me and that he would call me back. Been down that route before, so I said don’t bother, and I was sure it would get here by Friday. ( I needed it by Friday as I had gifted my current chair to someone else and they were picking it up on Friday.)

Long story short, the chair arrived on Thursday - it was covered in fine dust and damaged. The dust I cleaned with a bit of effort, and the damage was to a cosmetic part of the chair that no-one would notice, so I wasn’t going to send it back and go through what I was sure would be “chair hell” for the sake of a broken plastic cover.

New Item - Purchase Two
I have been looking for new two specific lenses for my camera for some time now - a Sigma 10-20mm zoom and a Sigma 70mm macro lens. I have watched the second hand market for a while and these lenses attract quite high prices due to the demand for them (and their reputation!).

So after an orgy of selling on eBay I finally could afford to purchase these brand new. My lens supplier of choice is SRS microsystems I checked their web site on Wednesday and both lenses were showing as “in stock”. I made a phone call to check on the returns policy, and had a chat with Nikki (hope that’s the right spelling!) who cleared up the point, then went into the stock room, found both lenses and offered to hold them for me for the day. As I was going to purchase anyway, I said “Fine”. I duly ordered both lenses from the SRS website. It combined postage so I paid only one lot of postage, took my money and sent me an email detailing what I had ordered, the expected dispatch date and the expected delivery time almost immediately. Time was 12:40pm

At 13:40pm I received an email from SRS to say the order had been dispatched. At 14:05pm Parcel Force sent me an email telling me my purchase from SRS was due to be shipped that day on the Express24 service, the address that it was going to be delivered to and a tracking number. I also received the usual emails from pay-pal detailing the transaction etc.

I didn’t need to call and I didn’t need to worry. I knew exactly where my goods were. Now they are here.

I know that a chair and two camera lenses are not exactly equivalent, but we are looking at the experience of buying here, not what was bought - so I think the comparison is valid.

So, the question I pose to you is: “Which company will I use again?”

Give yourself a score of one if you said SRSMicrosystems, and a “Seriously, dude!?” if you said 925 Furniture.

P.S. 925 Furniture were asked to comment on this blog post a full 24 hours before I posted it. They didn’t respond.

A tranquil place

I am currently exploring National Trust for Scotland properties on days when I don't feel like sitting in the house.

One such day was last Friday. We went to Greenbank Gardens where I took a shot of this statue situated in a pond in a delightful walled garden.


(Details: 50mm f8 1/400 iso 100)

There are many more NTS properties I'll be visiting over the next year or so, and if I can find anything that I want to share, I'll put it here.

Meanwhile enjoy this one.

Pontifications from a Practising Procrastinator

It is easy to do good work that matters to you.

All you have to do is exceed the expectations of the person(s) that you are working for in those tasks for which you have taken ownership - those tasks that matter to you.

The difficulty in that for me involves starting work.

I can find so many things to do before I start to do anything productive that nothing productive gets done.

I have email coming in with pundits relating the next big thing, I have news feeds that have to be checked, I have RSS feeds for a gazillion sites guaranteeing that something will change each day. I have ebay stuff to do, I have pictures to plan and take, I have forums to check and contribute to, and I have housework to do too. On top of that I am now watching about 8 series on TV so I have to watch those when the wife is out (Sci-fi is not her thing!).

All of which is a great load of excuses for not doing anything that matters to me.

Deciding what matters to you when you are your own master is hard for me - I have always defined myself in terms of my employment - now I am not employed, I am a little bit undecided as to what I should turn my attention.

Which brings me to the point of all this navel-gazing.

"End Malaria" (Kindle link - non-affiliate) may be a strange title for a business book, but it contains some musings by some gifted people that are all about working smarter and happier. And a portion of each sale goes towards mosquito nets for Africa to help end malaria. That's a win-win.

Reading it may simply be another way of not starting something that matters, but it got me writing this blog post....

In the shadows...

I was inspired by this article at Lightstalking.com ( one of my "go-to" web-sites for photography related items ) to try some simple low-key setups and shots.

Here is one result:


and while I like this, I think it is just a bit too ethereal.

This one, on the other hand, seems much more natural.


And when I try to analyse why, I come down to the faint shadow of the apple on the ground - that tiny detail just seems to "ground" the apple in reality, where the porcelain doll above just seems to float....

Here is a set-up shot for those who are into that sort of thing.


Yes, it was full daylight and if that puzzles you, can I point you to the aforementioned article ?

Comments are always welcome.

A Community Project

Each year, around the middle of August, the town of Irvine in Ayrshire, Scotland holds a festival known as Marymass.

The Marymass Queen and The Four Marys for 2011 (The Sunday Church Service Procession)


The festival is claimed to have been around since the 12th century, and today it is intimately linked with the Irvin Carters Society which has been around as long as there were incorporated trades in the town.

This year a call was put out for local photographers to document the festival in a project called "Marymass Through the Lens".

I was one of the photographers who responded, and I decided to document as many of the "peripheral" events as well as to try and get some shots of the main parade.

You can see some of the pictures I am submitting for the final project here.

If you would like to see the program for this years events (all finished now) it is here.

This was a fun project, and I enjoyed doing it - hopefully it will continue in the following years as a record of one of Scotlands oldest festivals.

Events that I took pictures at:

Marymass Special Highland Games
Marymass Lawn Bowls Championship
Senior Citizens Folk Concert
The Shows (Fairground rides etc.)
Horse Judging and Parade
Open Chess Tournament (1 of 2 left in Scotland, so I am told!)
The Sunday Church Service Procession
The 10K run (and no, I was not participating!)
The Flower Show

I thoroughly enjoyed donating my time to this worthwhile project, and I will update this blog post as soon as an outcome of all the photographers work is known.

Golfers

In Scotland, we have Golf Courses. They are everywhere. Some are private, some are expensive, some are municipal and a very few are public.
All have one thing in common - passionate, funny, crazy, emotional users. On any day of the week. On every day of the week!
And usually they make very good photography subjects.
I had some spare time yesterday so I thought I would give my camera a scare and take it out of the bag and use it.

I shot about 50 or so pictures and here are three I thought were worth sharing:


When I played golf, I had the uncanny ability to find the only piece of "rough" in a green sea of fairways. These guys just reminded me of that!


And this guy looks like he is trying to send this ball into the middle of next week... (it ended up in the bunker!)


Well, what can I say? Just because I was looking for golfers was no reason not to snap this guy in fighting position!

Yesterday was the first time I had been out for a while, and I once again found that "absence makes the heart grow fonder" - meaning a break now and then can be a good thing!

Thanks for listening.

How long!?

Wow! Coming up on two months since I wrote anything in this blog.

I'll bet no-one missed me ;-)

Lots of changes have been happening in my personal life - since I had a month off from work in January, to be precise.

During that month (off on sick leave for a very bad leg condition) I spent much more time with my wife than at any other time in our 33 years of marriage - either I was working or she was working, and we never spent this much time together - ever.
My wife is not currently employed ( I will not say "doesn't work" because keeping a house is hard work!) and suffers from arthritis. How badly, I only just appreciated in that month off.
Long story short, my working hours are soon to be drastically reduced. While this will mean a dramatic reduction in income, I am hoping it will lead to a better quality of life for my wife (and me!).

So in about a month or so, you might see an increase in activity in this site, and perhaps the Project 52 and Project 12 can be resurrected from the deep, deep, deep hibernation they are in - for which you (the one subscriber I had) have my apologies.
Some times "real life" just gets in the way....

The Cloud and you

Two things I can say for sure:

The cloud will fail.
The cloud will get better.

How much any of these two things means to you is dependent on how willingly, and how totally, you embrace the cloud.

Obligatory history lesson starts here:
In 1979 I built my first computer. I soldered the chip-carriers (2, I think) to the tiny PCB, and I soldered all the discretes in their rightful places and I attached power and it had life. A little while later it died (faulty character generator, if you must know).
From then on I had various computers (PET, TRS-80, AMSTRAD 464/664/PCW9512, CoCo, Amiga, Atari, Jupiter Ace, Sinclair Spectrum, IBM XT, IBM AT, a multitude of clones, home-brews and lately Apple Macs.)
All have failed in some way or another.

Lessons learnt from the above history? Technology will fail you (usually when you need it most) and technology improves if it lasts long enough.
Obligatory history lesson ends here.

Therefore, the cloud will fail, but it will improve.

If you are going to use the cloud, decide the level of failure you can tolerate, then use the cloud up to that level, and no more.

One example I know of:
A small business was having server problems - capacity and hardware were below par. The owner, a fairly tech-savvy guy, crunched his numbers and came up with a solution using Amazon. Unfortunately, like a lot of small businesses, the risk analysis was pretty much non-existent, and Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity were words heard once in a management seminar. But, hey, it's Amazon - what could go wrong? Well, Google "Amazon Cloud outage" and you will have a good idea. His business is still going, but some of his customers are tending to use the business less these days, and some are still in "negotiations" over goods supplied late.

Amazon are doing a lot to make sure this doesn't happen again, and so is the small business owner.

Between them, (with lots of hard work) they should be able to put this incident to rest. Out of it will come an improved cloud service, and a chastened, but wiser small business owner.

Why I use Open Source Software

Don't get me wrong - I use and advocate the use and support of closed source software any time I feel it is appropriate to do so. But it's not that often these days.

But I don't think the following scenario would have been possible using closed source equivalents, and I am damn sure that the cost of using them would have blown my budget out of the water!

I run a network. It has over 400 users, many of whom are mobile, work abroad for extended periods of time, and work all the hours God send us. Planned downtime is a rarity. Unplanned downtime is happening more frequently, but due to outside problems (power outage, internet congestion etc) rather than internal problems - although we have our fair share of those too!
I use Open Source software wherever possible and I do so because it is generally a better "fit" for the network tasks I have than some proprietary software. And I can usually bend it to fit what I want - I can't do that with closed source.

So when I get an OS solution that works, I tend to generally leave it alone. Oh, I apply security patches, but rarely do I update anything that's working unless I need the new feature(s) or they come with a security update.

That's why you can find installations of Apache 1.3 still working on intranet machines, why I still have working Slackware 11 installations and why some un-maintained programs are still doing the business on the network - they work and they are on internal machines with no security implications.

So when a power outage along with a faulty UPS takes out a machine that has been working steadily for the last 5 years as a dhcp server, a nat box, a wireless sign-on web page, a transparent proxy and a router for several private IP ranges, I take the opportunity to upgrade the hardware and software with thanks. When it happens on the Friday of a long weekend ( Friday through to Tuesday ), I am even more thankful for the opportunity to work on it uninterrupted.

Here is the setup:
Hardware: 4 disk rack mount 1U box with dual Athlon processors and 2 gigabytes of RAM ( A bit light these days, but should be enough) and 2 disks only installed
Software: Slackware64 13.1, standard full install. Main packages are Squid, Apache, dhcpd, dnsmasq, and some custom start up scripts for adding addresses to ethernet cards and starting iptables with the nat table entries and port redirects for the transparent proxy.

The process went something like this:

Install Slackware. ( 30 Minutes )
Get dnsmasq working as DNS server only
Get dhcpd (installed version) working. (15 Minutes )
Get Apache in default mode working then configure for my defaults. ( 15 Minutes )
Get Squid. Get Slackbuild script for Squid. Compile Squid. Install Squid ( 45 Minutes )
Read Squid documentation (BIG package, lots of changes since I last used Squid in anger!) (4 Hours )
Implement necessary changes to Squid configuration, test, and repeat. ( 12 hours, including Internet searches, reading Blogs, Wikis etc. )
( Transparent proxying using Squid was a hack in Squid 2, that has been elevated to "built-in" in Squid 3 - but judging by the Blog pages and wiki's it is problematic in Squid 3...)
Curse Squid (5 Minutes)
Get a copy of Squid 2, try to compile in 64 bits on target box. (2 hours, failed )
Curse Slackware ( 30 Seconds )
Find, install, configure and test an alternative to Squid for transparent proxying (TinyProxy )( 1 hour )
Install, test, debug and eventually modify the PHP pages for the wireless page signon. ( 3 hours)

Test all functions from various areas of the building ( 4 Hours )

Total time taken: ~ 28 hours on the software, spread over 2 days.

All the software was available, free and easily downloadable - no feature crippled demos, no limit on the number of connections/users/CPU's, nobody upselling, nobody bombarding me with phone calls/emails for stuff I don't want/don't need and am quite capable of finding for myself if or when I do, and no expiry date where they get a chance to do it all again in 12 months time.

And that is why I will put up with the occasional failure (looking at you, Squid*) in the Open Source model - they don't market this stuff, they just make it useful!

(* By the way, I am quite happy for Squid users to prove me wrong - it is a BIG package, and has over 170+ options, so there is every chance that I screwed up and not Squid - but TinyProxy went in, I did a minimal config and it just worked...)

Seeing things in Black and White

I never tended to do black and white photographs.
I said things like "the world is in colour, why monkey with it?" or "monochrome is monotonous" or any of several other throwaway lines that really meant only one thing - I did not know how to create a black and white photograph that had punch, drama and flair in any measure or combination.
Now I have a clue (yes, a small clue, but a good start!) how to go about doing it - I am not there yet, but my B&W conversions are starting to look interesting, at least to me :-)

So, what changed?

I read this book - which, while interesting, was mainly using Lightroom (which I have never used - yet!) and so was not of immediate use to me - until I came across this blog post by Bob Rockerfeller which ties it all up nicely, and provides the Lightroom to Aperture mappings (where they exist) so you don't have to....

But the key to it all is experimentation. Consider this series of images


Above: The Original

Above: Just sliding the saturation slider all the way left...

Above: using the Red Preset in Aperture

Above: Using the Blue Preset in Aperture

Above: Using the Green Preset in Aperture

Above: Using the Yellow Preset in Aperture

Above: Using the Orange Preset in Aperture

Above: Using the Low Contrast Preset in Aperture

Above: Using the Higher Contrast Preset in Aperture

Above: Using the Highest Contrast Preset in Aperture

Above: After my experimentation...

You don't need me to point out the differences, ( but in case you do look at the white lanterns on the front of the engine, and the metal panel between the buffer stops).

The last one is the one I like best, and although a little dark, it does have detail in all the brightest whites (unfortunately the sky is beyond anything but major surgery in Photoshop) and the hills in the background have appeared, as have details in the houses to the left.

So, from a so-so colour original, I appear to have made an interesting (well, to my mind anyway!) black and white shot, using some of the techniques laid out in the book, translated into an aperture workflow via Bob Rockerfellers site.
It was actually easier than it sounds!

Hope you like it, and if you are encouraged to go have a look at the site selling the book, check out some of the others on sale there - they are cheap ($5), written by some people who really know their stuff and make great lunch time reading.
Bob Rockerfellers blog I am still evaluating, but the information given there seems accurate, helpful and worth at least a little of your time.

As always, comments, suggestions, critiques and emails always appreciated.

Where are we now?

It's been two months since I wrote anything in this blog.

So what's been happening to slow me down?

Well, work got busy with some more politicking about who controls what. I won't even mention the disgusting antics of the Senior Management .
Personally, I got busy with some consultation work for an overseas venture that looks really interesting.
And something had to give. My photography went on the back boiler. As did this blog.
Apologies if you were looking for anything here or in Project 52 or Project 12.

I anticipate a change in circumstances for me over the next 3 months or so, so hopefully the posts will be more frequent.

In any event I was invited to an event a local radio-control yacht club was running yesterday. I had photographed their club events a year or so ago, and they invited me along to the national event they were hosting ( I probably would have been welcome if I hadn't taken my camera, but I took it anyway!).

The weather was a bit of a disappointment - partial cloud cover and very little wind - nice for humans, useless for sailors!

Last years pictures were full of drama with bow waves and churning wakes, this year not so much.

Here is a snap from last year:


And here is yesterdays efforts:


As you can see, no bow waves, no chop, and to my mind, less dramatic.

I'll put up a gallery later on with some more yachting pics from 2009/10 and 2011.

Hope you like them!

Web Makeover, Part 2

In the original Web Makeover article, I spoke about using Aperture 3 to produce "web journals" then incorporating them into my RapidWeaver site.
That worked, but any updates are a long-winded process.
So I investigated Rapid Album, a plug-in for RapidWeaver specifically for producing my photographic galleries. And it does the job.
But that doesn't mean I have stopped looking - and I am considering hand-coding my own solution, which is something I do at work a lot, but I really don't want to have to do it for this site - I could use the time for something much more productive :-)

I have checked out a new "plug-in" from the SymfoniP people - Gallery Box - which produces a Gallery a lot like many "off-the-shelf" websites that I have seen. They have the pictures in box with a "carousel" of thumbnails along the bottom. There are lots of options and it seems to work well. I might use it at sometime in the future.

But for now the quest continues for my version of the "perfect gallery" - I know it's out there, somewhere.

Software "Updates"

Yesterday was all about Realmac Softwares RapidWeaver.

I have used RapidWeaver since version 3.5 and I have followed along the sometimes bumpy ride of updates, right up until version 4+

Version 5.0 was released on December 1, and apart from the usual bug fixes and a “resource” feature (single folder storage of all your websites assets, replacing per page assets), there was not a lot that I could see to recommend it as it was a paid upgrade.

Then along comes the Mac App Store, and RapidWeaver 5.0 is now priced at £23.99. At that price, an upgrade was definitely in my near future.

So, do I upgrade using the untried and untested Mac App Store route, or I do bite the bullet an pay a few extra pounds and stick to the more traditional method?

To test out the Mac App Store I bought a copy of GarageBand 11 to see what would happen to my installed GarageBand 09. I suspected that, as the user has no control over the installation destination, then it would overwrite my existing install - and that is exactly what happened.

So for RapidWeaver, I chose the traditional route. I saw the price at £26.62 and thought, “OK, that’s a few pounds dearer than the App Store” - but of course Realmac had chosen not to display the VAT along with the price, which was a nice surprise when I got to the checkout.

End result was I got RapidWeaver 5.0 from Realmac at £31.94.

Oh, and by the way, after downloading the software I found some obvious bugs that shouldn’t have made it out into the world, and found that I had been pointed to the initial 5.0 release, not one containing the bug fixes Realmac brought out a few days later (V 5.01, then V 5.02). An update from within RapidWeaver brought me up to the latest version.

So, was it all worth it? Like most things, it depends. I regularly maintain 6 web-sites, and occasionally work on about a dozen more with RapidWeaver so I can’t afford to have it not work properly. Thankfully, I can run both V 5+ and V 4+ on the same machine without too many problems - you just need to be rigorous in keeping the project files separated! (And having both installed was another reason why I should have gone the Mac App route!) Also, you must upgrade to the latest versions of all your plug-ins (preferably before you install V 5).

If you maintain many websites with RapidWeaver on a professional basis then be cautious - there are still issues lurking about with the V 5 “upgrade” that could cause your re-publishing time to be very much longer than you are used to, and also colour picker problems - but Realmac say that they are working on these problems.

Incidentally, there were separate issues with the App Store version as well, which means that the App Store version is now on V 5.03, while my version number is V 5.02. Hopefully this will all come together in the near future.

If you upgraded to Mac OS X 10.6.6 and have the Mac App Store then go that route. If you are still on 10.5.8 then you have to go the Realmac website route.
Assuming, of course that you want to upgrade given the issues.

For your reference:
http://www.realmacsoftware.com/forums/index.php/forums/viewthread/42058/
http://www.realmacsoftware.com/forums/index.php/forums/viewthread/41461/

I have downgraded to the latest V 4 release, and that’s where I will stay for my production sites. I will still experiment with V 5, but I will not use it for anything important until the bugs are ironed out.

Bottom Line: RapidWeaver V5+ wasted a lot of my time - and while it cost me money too, the time lost is something I can never recover.
Not happy.