I also want to play with different films, learn printing and scanning...and the mechanical precision of a hefty metal SLR is sublime. When I've mastered all this I'll be much better at digital too. Perhaps in a couple of years I'll graduate to a full frame mirrorless digital body and stick my Takumars on it. I want to understand all the differences between film and digital. In the meantime I've got a clever little Lumix compact which I'll carry on using.

I want to know how it all works - the relationship between aperture, film speed, focal length, depth of field...

Greetings all, I'm new here. I live near a rather good photography centre with courses, darkroom, scanning suite etc so I've taken it into my head to learn from scratch. I don't even know what focal length is. But you've got to start somewhere and I thought that a manual film camera would be the thing to learn on. I was given a KR-10, then I noticed three highly rated screw thread primes on Gumtree at a good price, with a Spotmatic thrown in. Then, just for the thrill of it, I spent £25 on a job lot of five mystery K mount lenses from someone clearing out their grandad's attic. No doubt they'll come with plenty of free fungus. Then I had a reality check and decided I would probably never have the bottle to get much street photography done with a SLR unless it had a nice big waist level viewfinder...and then I read about the LX and saw a nice one on ebay complete with Action Finder. So by this time tomorrow I should have three bodies and eight lenses...but I haven't taken one photo yet. In at the deep end. If it doesn't work out I reckon I can sell the gear for a modest profit!

So...can anyone recommend any beginners' books or web sites to learn from? I've got the Spotmatic manual, which looks surprisingly helpful. I would like to understand some of the physics of film cameras, but I'm afraid I failed my physics O level.

Thank you OldTaffy for this, you've just enabled me to find out the provenance of the adapter I've bought. It's identical to the Jessops one. It's fiddly but it works. After fiddling with it there were lots of new specs of I don't know what on the mirror. So I am relegating it to my Ricoh KR-10 and will try not to remove/refit it too often. Tomorrow my LX arrives, and I've just ordered a real Pentax adapter for it. No way will I sully it with anything inferior! Luckily I found an adapter for 'only' £30 at Etsy. The ones on ebay today are £40 plus.