Well if it helps any, I had to go out tonight, so I haven't got round to eBaying it. I may list it on Sunday night for 7 days, or I may leave it till next week and scrape around elsewhere for some cash.

At risk of going off topic, what do people think of the A 28 F2.8? I have one, hardly ever use it, haven't been that wild about it when I have.

Should I persevere?

50mm SMC-A F1.7

Excellent condition, optically and cosmetically.

Pictures of it here, some taken with my new FA50. Any specks you can see are dust, not damage.

The last few of these on eBay seem to have gone for about £55 + P&P or a bit more. One went for £79 but I think that's taking the p*** a little.

Special delivery will be about £6 in the UK, so let's say £60, shipped to a UK address.

Apologies for the short notice, but please get in quickly if you're interested - I like to do 10 day eBay listings ending on a Sunday night, so I need to list this tonight if there's no interest here.

PayPal preferred, since time is of the essence at the moment.

That's a point... you only get one notification of new posts on a thread, don't you.

So deleting and reposting shouldn't result in two notifications.

Was it me, John?

I have deleted and reposted (very soon after deletion) a couple of times, just to avoid the 'edited' message which has always annoyed me a bit when the edit is a) almost immediate and b) hasn't yet been followed by a subsequent post on the same thread.

If it's causing unwanted side effects, though, I'll refrain in future.

I certainly can't beat that - having just acquired an FA50 1.4, I've been thinking that some serious rationalisation is needed, and I only have three others - two A 1.7s and a 2.

I have two 400s (Sigma and Pentax), two Sigma A 28-200s, one of which is broken, and two 28s (Pentax A and a grotty old Tokina). Those are up for down-sizing too, soon.

I thought your post last night at 19:15 was fine - as you summarised, zooms are variable focal length, telephotos are fixed, and a picture taken with a zoom set to focal length x should look much the same as one taken with a telephoto of focal length x.

There's a lot of extra information in Anvh's post that, with respect, perhaps isn't quite in the simple terms you were looking for! That doesn't at all make you stupid, which you clearly aren't.

Exactly.

If you mean the compression of perspective that you get when photographing distant objects (usually, granted, with long focal-length lenses), it has nothing to do with the focal length of the lens, and everything to do with the distance of the camera from the subject.

The idea that that perspective compression is caused by the telephoto lens is quite misleading - it's simply a result of the tendency to photograph distant objects with telephoto lenses.

Take a picture of the same scene with a wide angle and a telephoto, from the same place, and compare the crop of the wide angle shot that corresponds to the field of view you get with the telephoto. Enlargement losses aside, the perspective should be identical.

You might want to practise a bit before the day you want the best results.

Aim to get the focusing ring in the middle of the (very small) range over which you get the focus confirmation hexagon displayed.

Take lots of exposures, and re-focus after each one. Don't assume that because you haven't touched anything, nothing's moved and it's still right. Even so, you'll probably still get lots of duds for no apparent reason.

Use one of the mirror-up delay modes (preferably the 3s remote one) to minimise shake.

You want the moon as high in the sky as possible.