Bigger hole in front: more light. Hole open longer: more light. And vice versa.

Other than that, read the manual, take pictures, experiment, refine. Post examples, ask questions, repeat.

There are lots of resources, from the very basic to the very technical, but you seem like the sort of person that's not too scared to use Google.

You'll find people here very sympathetic to the enthusiastic, thoughtful beginner. Get Picasa, which is free, is great for cataloguing, and has simple, basic editing tools.

I wouldn't try to learn too much theory before getting stuck in. Digital photography is very cheap if you already have the camera, and you'll rapidly get a better idea of what you need to think and ask about once you've had a go.

Forgive me if I haven't answered your question in quite the way you asked it. However, I really like the Luminous Landscape, which I dip into from time to time.

Yes, technically, you're right. I wasn't really disagreeing with the letter of the 'law', as you've quoted.

As I said, though,
Chris@SRS has probably got the most spectacularly untarnished reputation here of any UK dealer in recent history. Given that, I think you can cut him a little slack.

It's not even as if he had omitted to say it was ex-demo. That would be another matter altogether.

I'm making an issue here because dealers with the superb attention to fantastic service that Chris consistently displays are extremely rare.

Attacking them over a trivial and irrelevant detail, when there is no ambiguity at all if you read the description, is pointless and unhelpful.

Not really. It's never been sold before, so it's new. It's got a two year guarantee. It's been looked at a few times by people, so it's ex-demo. It's at a price commensurate with this.

All this is perfectly apparent from the description.

Given Chris's exceptional reputation for service, I do think it's a little churlish to attack the description as questionable, given that in every respect, it's perfectly clear.

Sure... no disagreement there.

How is that relevant though? It's not the movement of the focus ring that enables the camera to tell the image is sharp.

As I understand it, it's quite the reverse - the camera measures the out-of-focusness, and moves the focus (if it can) accordingly.

I'm sure those that understand phase detection AF systems better than I do can explain it better, but if the AF system can tell a MF lens is in focus using the centre AF point, why not one of the others?

So it is! I'd forgotten that.

Why is this the case, do you think? Why shouldn't it be able to use the other AF points, just because MF lens is stuck on the front?

Yes, I'd certainly agree with this. I've got very used to positioning the ring as close as I can to the middle of the range over which the hexagon is lit, which seems to work for me.

However, unless there's a back focusing issue, the latitude you describe isn't as great (at least not on my K10D) as it would have to be, to account for the substantial focus error in the OP's picture.

Doubtless a different screen will help with manual focus, but there's still no reason why AF confirmation shouldn't enable you to focus manually, and have the camera tell you it's in focus.

Using the green confirmation hexagon in the viewfinder works fine for subjects like this. You just need to be sure it's using the centre AF point, and, very importantly, not move the camera after you have focus confirmation.

It doesn't need to move much, especially with a close subject like this one, to spoil it completely.

I'm looking to integrate a forum application with a community-relations type website. It needs to be ASP.NET and SQL Server based, and there are a number of options.

One, obviously, is to pick from a variety of third party ones, and set about all the integration work, how much of which there'll be, I'm not yet sure.

The other, not so obviously, is to roll my own. I know that it would be a lot of work to build a fully featured forum application from scratch, but it wouldn't be anywhere near from scratch, since the database and a lot of the functionality underlying the site I'm integrating with is already written, and supports the data structures needed.

My question relates to how much of the forum eye-candy is actually important, since it's there that the majority of the work would be if I rolled my own. So the more important that side of it is, the more work it would be, so the more sensible it would be to integrate an existing 3rd party application.

So, specifically, to those that use a variety of online forums:

How important are features like:

- quoting others' posts
- smilies
- signatures
- bold/italic/colours
- uploading (or displaying inline) pics
- avatars

... and other features that you may think are important (such as an extensive moderation tool set perhaps).

I was surprised to discover the forums at PCAdvisor are very basic indeed, yet they're quite popular.

Complemented by the unedited bit of sensor dust - a vital part of the composition, I hope you'll agree.

It says, "Yes, the lens really is as good as it looks, I didn't edit the picture at all."

Nearly all my eBay pictures are taken with the SMC-A 50mm F1.7.

You'll want something that's still sharp at very small apertures, to give max depth of field.

For instance (John might recognise this):

[IMG]http://i162.photobucket.com/albums/t244/chris5gd/eBay%20photos/Pentax%2075_300_FAJ/IMGP7686-crsmsh.jpg[/IMG]

More important than the lens, I suspect, is the tripod and the long exposure that you'll need with the small aperture.