Is it really any different in the amateur world? Everywhere you look on this forum people refer to lenses by their focal length - often not even referring to their manufacturer with the common ones.

What's the difference between these?

Were there equally definitive definitions for formats bigger than 35mm?

(edit: lest George berate me for tautology, perhaps I should say "unequivocal definitions")

Sorry, had a closer look. Not strictly 'downloadable'. But I got mine the same day. (It might even have been the same hour, but I was probably lucky.)

Still excellent value though, and I'm not related to Matt

This is a subject that comes up time and again.

This thread is very helpful, as is Matt's downloadable guide which is excellent value at only a fiver.

Otherwise, it might be better if you can describe specific problems that you're having, so that people can provide specific help.

I know the manuals appear complicated, but if you sit down with the camera, the flash, and the manual, and work through the instructions slowly, one step at a time, they're reasonably clear most of the time. But that's the only way - expecting to read through the manual and absorb it straight away is unrealistic.

It really isn't possible to condense a whole textbook into a simple "just do this" recipe.

Personally, I find trial and error to be very helpful, in conjunction with the instructions. Lots of experimentation at home is key, I find, before going out and having to 'perform'.

In my experience, 'telephoto' is usually used in reference to a longer-than-normal focal length, fixed focal length lens. Anything from 75mm and upwards, I guess - and I've heard the term in conjunction with 'short' and 'long'.

100mm would be a short telephoto; 300+ would be long, but these aren't fixed definitions by any means.

Zoom lenses are all of variable focal length, and would not necessarily include long focal lengths.

A telephoto zoom, although not a particularly common term, for instance, might be 100-300mm. You definitely wouldn't hear the Sigma 10-20, which is a zoom, described as a telephoto.

The camera thinks it's underexposed because most of the frame is dark.

However, the moon is extremely bright, so that part of the frame is likely to be overexposed. You'll just get a white disc with no detail that way.

You don't need high ISO, and you don't need long exposures to photograph the moon. In fact exposures much more than 1/10s, depending on focal length, will be long enough for the tracking of the moon across the sky to itself cause blur.

What you need is accurate focusing, the longest focal length lens you can lay your hands on (210 is very much on the short side, given you're using 35mm film) and spot metering on the moon itself.

And a tripod.

I took this, for example, with a 400mm lens (you'd need 600mm to get the same angle of view), ISO 100, 1/80s and F11, on the K10D.

It was heavily cropped, though - that's nowhere near the whole frame, which is a touch inconvenient with film, of course.

Note also that the detail is clearer a day or two before full moon - the shadows arising from the illumination not being quite direct make for a more contrasty picture.

Here's a full moon for comparison. Much less exposure (F16, 1/125s, and still too much, really), since the full moon is much, much brighter than a slightly not-full moon.

Just thought a little note on this thread was appropriate - to the effect that I'm now the proud owner of the OP's FA50. Perfectly smooth transaction, very well packed, quickly despatched and exactly as he describes.

Since we don't have the equivalent of an eBay rep score here, I just thought I'd like to make public my appreciation.

I'm now looking forward to getting to know it .

It's plausible, given the way lenses have gone up.

I'm so, SO glad I got my two Samsung 540s when Amazon were doing them for about £180.

Prices have gone beyond a joke. Even a bag for the flash gun is thirty quid.

Barking. Simply barking.

It's a great pleasure to read your posts, Don.

You have an enviable talent for hitting the nail right on the head.

Very nice, especially the last one, which was exquisitely timed, and a very good choice of shutter speed to stop them both.

(For those not used to shooting the Red Arrows, you need a much shorter exposure than you think you might, when they're crossing like this, if you're panning on one of them. This is because panning on one effectively doubles the speed of the other, and you get a result like this with too slow a shutter speed - 1/400s in this case, which is normally plenty fast enough.)

Although I'm very impressed with the timing on all those shots, I think I'd prefer to see a little more colour in the Reds themselves in some of them, notably 6 and 7.

One word of concern though - Firefox (I have 3.5.2) is doing something quite unpleasant to the way the pictures are rendered.

With your Stearmans as well as your Reds, it's displaying them a little larger inline in the thread, than if you click on the pictures and show them in a separate tab. Inline, they look quite blurred.

Initially I thought they were all out of focus, but looking at the pictures separately, they clearly aren't, which was a great relief to discover, since the Stearman shots, as well as these, are very good otherwise.

The problem isn't present in IE8.