Well I got some extension tubes - Jessops PK/A ones - and I've had a go with them - a rather dopey bee got into the house yesterday so I put the 31mm tube in between the K10D and the 50mm A-series F1.7.

Do they clean themselves more when they're not sleepy? I've never seen as much dust and stuff on a bee before. But maybe I've just not looked as closely.

I'm thinking about how I might go about doing some close up work with the K10D, and I guess the first step is the glassware. I'm a complete noob when it comes to close work, so bear with me...

AFAICS, my options are:

- Extension tubes
- Screw on close up lenses
- Adaptor for turning the lens round.
- Macro lens

The close up lenses seem very inexpensive - are they too cheap to be worth anything? And macro lenses can be expensive.

I'm not wild about turning the lens round, since I don't really want to be exposing the innards to dust.

So extension tubes or close up lenses would seem to be possible options.

But I'd appreciate some comments on these from those that know about such matters - or just a relevant link would be fine too.

I posted this in the DSLR forum, since I want in particular to find a solution that doesn't leave me with the manual mode metering problems.

TIA.

Spot on. Many thanks.

I was playing with long exposures on the K10D last night, and took some shots of a dark scene where the shutter was open for about 30 seconds.

I noticed that after the shutter closed, it then took about as many seconds to display the shot as the shutter had been open. For instance, after a 30 second exposure, it was 28 seconds before the shot came up and it was ready for another one.

Presumably it's processing the data it's recorded, and the longer the exposure, the longer it takes. Is it aggregating a number of 'time slices'-worth of information?

The write-to-card doesn't seem any longer, and it doesn't seem to make any difference whether it's creating a JPEG or a RAW file.

Can anyone shed any light on this (pun intended )?

If you're going to be using a tripod, I can't see any advantage of the 100D, other than cost.

This may be so if the sole criterion is noise at high ISO, and if the high ISO is essential to keep shutter speeds short.

However, if the lighting is really, really low, then even with shake reduction, the single extra stop you get with ISO 3200 as opposed to 1600 may not be enough to ensure sharp, hand-held shots.

In which case you're in tripod territory anyway, and then you may as well have a longer exposure, reduce the ISO and hence noise, and go for the more versatile K10D.

I've also hunted through the manual and the Pentax web site in search of such a claim, and failed to find one.

However, it seems clear that they at least intended it to work, even if there's no actual claim to that effect. Otherwise, why would the green button stop the lens down and set a shutter speed at all? It only has this behaviour in manual mode, and with pre-A lenses (or A lenses in non-A mode), AFAICT.

If they'd really intended the K10D to be unusable with pre-A lenses, I wouldn't have expected them to make it do that at all.

So it does!!

You're quite right.

With the camera in Manual mode, with A-series lenses (set to A) or later, yes. With whatever aperture and shutter speed you have selected, there's a display in the viewfinder and on the top LCD panel that shows you how much over/under exposed you are. Move the camera around, and this changes as the meter sees different light levels.

Press the green button, and it sets the shutter speed for correct exposure (or the aperture for a chosen shutter speed if you choose an alternative option in the menu).

However, with M series lenses, it does not do this. There's no over/under display in manual mode.

With these, to get any reading at all in manual mode, you have to press the green button, which stops the lens down, and sets a shutter speed. The wrong one, usually.

However, in aperture priority or program mode, it does meter the light, and it does set a shutter speed. Since it's metering with the lens wide open, presumably the shutter speed can only be right if you leave it wide open.

If only. The problem is that without stopping hte lens down, the camera has no way of knowing what the aperture ring has been set to.

This thread discusses some of the problems with stop-down metering with pre-A lenses:

https://www.pentaxuser.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=3867