Well having seen all these, and only on my old Iiyama 17 inch monitor, I like the first one the best. It looks very natural.

The colours aren't as saturated as in the modified ones (especially golfdiesel's), but which is the most like reality?

It reminds me of the arguments I used to have with my brother (something of a purist, and a very good action photographer, specialising in the Red Arrows and Formula 1) about Konica film.

I used to like it, precisely because the greens were larger than life. On a 6x4 print, the impact of the unrealistic colour saturation compensated for the fact that you were looking at a bit of paper, not a garden.

But I had to concede, it wasn't real.

Similarly, I'd guess that the least modfied image here is the one most like reality, despite it not having the impact of the later ones.

I agree that most of the features VF lists are beyond my needs.

But I'd still take issue with this - both he and I have already given uses for this that would be nice to have out of the studio.

I accept, obviously, that adding features adds cost - how much do you think adding live feed would add to the cost?

Really, not even the 'slimming' feature?

Have to agree with this.

People tend to freeze up and look awkward if they notice that they're at the wrong end of a camera lens, so for getting candids, over the years I've learned to point the camera reasonably accurately without having to look through the viewfinder, thereby giving my intentions away.

It would be nice to be able to sneak a sideways look at the LCD to confirm that the shot is framed right.

Thought I'd take this advice.

My other half said, "quick, one of them's dying, will you take a picture of it", so I did.

I can't make up my mind whether I like this or not, mostly since the three background blooms clutter the foreground one. But then, this is how it looks, so I'm not sure.

I've brightened it a bit (maybe a bit too much), since it was a bit underexposed, but apart from cropping slightly, applied no sharpening or other manipulation to this image. I've a sharpened version, and it's more eye-catching than this, but I thought I'd post the unsharpened version for comment. There's more detail in the uncompressed original (10MP JPG; default camera sharpening and contrast settings).

It was taken on the K10D with your old 75-300 FAJ, John, 1/6s at F11 and 75 mm. Natural light only.

What, len's you mean?

Oops. It appears that I edited rather than replied.

The original problem was that with an A-series lens attached to any or all of the Jessop PK/A extension tubes, attached in turn to the K10D, no aperture control was possible from the camera. The display (with the lens in A mode) just looked the way it does with a pre-A lens on the camera - no aperture information.

Solution above !

Delighted to report that the problem with my Jessop PK/A extension tubes is now sorted; many thanks to Mannesty for pointing me in the right direction.

(https://www.pentaxuser.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=2720 - last few posts)

The body mount end of each tube is painted, and a bit of judicious scraping to remove just enough paint to allow the 7th body contact to touch the metal of the tube was all that was necessary.

I now have full A-mode with my A-lenses, with the tubes mounted in any order. If I attach the 18-55 DA to the tubes, AF doesn't work, but I still have aperture control.

Here are some pics of the tubes (K10D, hand-held with 50mm A F1.7, at F8 ish and built-in flash, using the tubes). As you can see, my technique leaves a little to be desired (especially the first one), but it did the job.

Please could someone tell me what aperture information, if any, you'd expect to be able to set (and see on the displays) from the camera with this combination of kit:

K10D
'A' series lens (in A mode)
Jessop PK/A Extension tubes

Thanks. If an unambiguous answer to this is in the manual, please point it out (with an RTFM if you like!)

I've tried spot and centre-weighted as well.

Well the picture was taken less than a couple of seconds after the exposure reading each time, and the camera was on a tripod. AFAICT the lighting wasn't changing significantly - one was indoors under natural light, the other was, as I said, a garden scene, sky uniform and cloudy.

I wouldn't have thought so. One was a bush in the garden (leaves, twigs etc) and the other was a row of books on a shelf.

I'm not trying to compare different lenses here, I know they can be a bit different.

I'm just noticing that for a given lens the metered exposure at a number of different apertures result in wildly different amounts of light ending up at the sensor - some of the shots metered this way are very over- or under- exposed.

But I have tried a couple of A lenses in both A-mode and manual. The exposures were significantly different in A-mode and non-A, for a given selected aperture (in A-mode, aperture selected on the camera, obviously).

Excellent advice.

However, it was as a result of trying things out for myself - having read the manual on how to use pre-A lenses - that I started that thread in the first place.

If I'm doing something wrong, and the camera's fine after all, don't you think I'd dearly love to know?

What I do is:

- Enable Aperture Ring
- Set camera to manual
- select desired aperture on M-series lens
- press green button, noting that lens stops down and shutter speed is set
- take picture

Can you see anything wrong with this procedure?