Getting the camera back to factory defaults may well help. So might finding some bright red cars to practise on! Also, are you using the histogram to check your exposure? If you don't need the underexposure you are better off without it.

At least those red cars look like they were parked up, so you could reshot if the histogram showed overexposure.

BTW I'm not sure if polarisers help with glare from cars - they do help with water and glass, I think I heard somewhere not with cars but I could be wrong. It might depend on the car as well - on it's paint and finish. Will see what happens with my modern car next time the sun shows it's face round here. It's not red but my neighbours have a red car.

Personally I shot RAW + a 2MB JPG.

I set up a different file name. Don't want to mess with the actuations count. Thanks all. Now to try some black cat in a coal hole photography, and get the k7 packed up for eBay.

I'd like my K5ii to carry on the numbering from just after the K7 leaves off - so the first one is IMGP04000 rather than IMGP00001. Is this possible? I thought not after reading the instructions but I'm not entirely sure.

I'm thrilled with the high-ISO noise compared to the K7, and CS4 copes just find with with it's DNG files. I could see from the small JPGs I shot alongside the RAWs that they can clean up very well.

Your dog is very sweet!

Have just ordered a K5ii. Hopefully it will arrive early next week, and the first photos I take will be of the K7 to go on Ebay.

I agree some better glass might be in order, but for the cat photography especially a zoom is really useful, and really good zoom lenses are a bit of an oxymoron and good ones are £££££....

Want to upgrade my K7. I mostly do two types of photography with it:

1) landscape which is ISO 100, f8, tripod, and whatever shutter speed it sets. Sometimes I use an ND filter if there is moving water. Quite happy with these images.

2) cats in available light. Here I need to use a high ISO to get a hand-holdable shutter speed and sometimes the noise is a big problem and spoils otherwise good images. These are the shots I want to upgrade for - the better high-ISO performance and better focusing should benefit this. Should add that I often do close-ups - I more or less fill the frame with the cat's head.

A lot of the shots go on a friend's website, but I also print A4, can print A3, and will go back to camera club sometime and will be wanting to enter some cat prints, so they need to be sharp and low noise enough. Note that they are often cropped as well.

So, will the iis benefit the cat photography? I'm not using super-sharp lenses.