Best to get horizons right when taking the picture, but you can change them afterwards. I never seem to be able to 'see' straight... (and it is not the cameras fault as some have experienced - I checked it!)

I have taken the liberty of taking one of your pictures, straightened the horizon, then improved it a bit by brightening it using the histogram adjustment tool, slightly adjusting the colour temperature, and tweaking up the saturation a notch.

This is the result which I think is an improvement

But no control wheel or DOF lever - OTOH you do get a LH button. As A RH person who does not use a grip however I shan't be bothering with any of them!

Tunisia of course was used as a film set - notably using a 'troglodyte' dwelling like that in the third pic for the skywalker house on Tattoine:
http://www.tunisia.com/Tunisia/Travel/Star-Wars-in-Tunisia
It was also used for Monty Python's Life of Brian.

If you go on a package holiday there be sure to take one of the two night/three day desert expiditions. Typically they will take you (in 4WD vehicles over rather bumpy territory) to Jeda -where there is a Roman amphitheatre to rival the Colliseum, overnight (in rather basic accomodation) in one of the troglodyte dwellings, a drive across immense salt flats, a camel ride in the desert (obligatory really), a stay at a hotel in an oasis, and a trip into the foothills of the Atlas Mountains. Stacks of photo opportunitiles!

Being temporarily back in the UK I have been re-united with my slide collection and also my ScanDual III which I got to work with Windows Vista using VueScan. So I was going through old slides sort of at random and came across a set from a holiday with my brother in Tunisia back in April 1991. In those days I was quite a keen photographer but had little technical understanding. I just took photos. All taken on a P30 with a Tokina 28-70. The first three are Kodachrome 200, the last one I think is Ektachrome. While I am now more technically proficient I think I had a pretty good 'eye' back then - at least looking at these pics.

I've tweaked the colour up a bit and cropped the third one a bit, otherwise they are as taken. Comments welcome!

Roofs in the town



A street market (it was early in the season so not all thet busy!)



At one of the 'troglodyte' dwellings in the desert



From the foothils of the Atlas Mountains looking back over an oasis and the desert.

Early days with my ME super and a Sigma 35-70 back in 1986 at Longleat (just been going through old slides and thought it might be fun to enter this!)

Well, Pentax, Sigma, Tamron and Tokina all make very good macro lenses - but none of them are that cheap new or even second hand.

So given that your budget is probably small you have the following options.

It has been said that there is no such thing as a bad macro lens - even the cheap and plasticy Cosina 100 3.5 (which also exists rebadged in Vivitar and even I think Pentax livery) is a pretty decent performer - though it needs an adaptor (which came with some of the versions) to do true 1:1. Otherwise it is 1:2

Alternatively, get a set of extension tubes to use with the 50mm lens. Or get some close up filters - they can produce quite decent results.

Or look for a used Pentax manual macro - though they are generally 1:2 rather than 1:1 (there is is 1:1 SMC A 100 but they are rare and fetch similar prices to the autofocus versions. There is also a 50mm extension tube which turnes the 50 1:2 into a 1:1) I have the SMC A 50 f2.8 (which is 1:2) and it is a very useful lens.

Yes - you can get them from a company in China called Virtual Village via ebay - they seem to be a reliable firm

The Miranda MS-3 used the PK mount for its lenses (It was a rebadged Cosina sold through Dixons), which means any lenses for your Miranda should work on the *istD (though be careful, some non Pentax manual focus PK mount lenses won't go on the later Pentax bodies - so don't try to force it if it won't go on).

See http://www.mirandacamera.com/_modelinfo/_dixons/dixons.htm

Of course as there is mixed lighting (as in this case) and one of the sources is flickering then the overall colour balance would also be flickering because the mix of the two sources would be changing...

Our eyes are 'fooled' but not the camera - and if the shutter speed is faster than a complete cycle of the mains - 1/50s in UK (I realise my earlier suggestion of 1/100s was wrong - you need to cover a whole cycle, not half a cycle) then the camera will only catch that portion of the cycle, which means the camera won't even things out the way the eye does, and there may be colur balance vatiations - further, if the metering is not 'real time' there may be exposure errors too.

If you watch a CRT TV screen it looks like a complete picture. Photograph it at any shutter speed faster than 1/50s and you won't see the whole picture. It is the same principle.