Welcome, Andy

This is necessary with the K10D as well, else the shutter will not fire when you press the button.

No, it is not different. If you meter wide open and then calculate the shutter speed for your selected aperture, all will be well.

The issue with the K10D is that stop-down metering in manual mode with pre-A lenses is not accurate. I'd urge you to search the forum here; there have been several threads on this topic.

For instance:

https://www.pentaxuser.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=3867&highlight=k10d+stop+me...
https://www.pentaxuser.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=4222&highlight=k10d+stop+me...
https://www.pentaxuser.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=3887&highlight=k10d+stop+me...

HTH

Not sure about screens. People seem to have swapped them, but it takes a bit of screwdriver work and a steady hand, from what I gather.

Surely no one would cheat here

I think ideally they should be new pictures, since all the more experienced folk will have to do is wheel out something appropriate from their existing portfolio.

Making people take something fresh would provide a new challenge, and level the playing field somewhat, but I don't think it's entirely practical.

Maybe a compromise - photos must not have been entered for any competition before, nor submitted and accepted by a gallery (like the Pentax one) where acceptance has to be granted for the photos to be displayed.

Splendid. This is the sort of wrong I like to be

Looking forward to your thoughts

And this seems to be a consistent theme from others too - there's a worrying amount of "dud results on auto" out there. Particularly since I'm thinking of investing in something that's supposed to be able to give me good results on auto.

Indeed.

And presumably, the flash-sensor cuts off the flash when it's measured a total amount of reflected light, returning to it from whatever its field of view happens to be.

If there's a significant amount of light returning to the flash sensor from an area outside the camera's angle of view, is it not possible that what remains inside the camera's angle of view will be therefore be underexposed?

If so, then

cannot be true, since it's the focal length of the lens and camera sensor size that determine the camera's angle of view.

Incidentally, I realise that using a shorter focal length won't change the duration of the flash in this instance, and therefore the part of the frame that looked dark before won't get any more light.

But with more of what comes back to the flash sensor now contributing to the picture, the bright bits from the previously cut off part will look bright, and presumably appropriately so in relation to the dark bit that was in the frame before.

I suppose the only way to fix this is the way they do with more sophisticated guns - focus the beam from the flash more, so that it comes back from a smaller area.

Please elaborate

Absolutely. Most of what goes on inside my head makes perfect sense.

Till it comes out, that is, hence the thinking aloud...

Hey, just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you

That's a good point, which I hadn't thought of.

But wouldn't it be the case that regardless of the crop factor, a non-zoomable flash head will have a single focal length above which the sensor FOV, being fixed, is greater than the lens's one, assuming that the lens can be zoomed to a long enough focal length?

I guess the focal length at which this happens will be shorter with a DSLR though.

I've been experimenting a bit with an old auto-sensor flash - the Braun 320 BVC. It has bounce and swivel, but no zoom. And only one pin on the bottom. Nevertheless, I measured its trigger voltage at only about 8V, so I've gone ahead and used it on the K10D

I was getting a few underexposed shots until I noticed that if I zoomed the lens out a bit, the exposure was fine.

I came to the tentative conclusion that the angle of view seen by the sensor could, if the lens focal length was too long, be too great, and therefore respond to more reflected light than gets in through the lens.

Is this likely to be right?