The 18-135 is the fastest focusing Pentax lens that I've encountered, by a significant margin.

The 35mm DA 2.4 is hardly slow, and neither is the 50mm FA 1.4. The 17-70 is fairly fast, I find, despite being SDM.

None of these is as quick as the 18-135.

If it's not fast enough, you need to fix your technique, or change to Nikon

You're more than welcome. I've been learning quite a bit about composition from some of your recent images, so my thanks to you.

Very nice indeed (and not just the spelling ).

I must say, you're very good with composing elements of empty space. The drops that might fall have some space to fall into - much better than a tighter crop.

The only thing that detracts very slightly is that the depth of field wasn't enough to get the left hand droplet as sharp as the others hanging from the main leaves.

I'm also not a fan of the fancy borders - but that's just me, as is the fact that I keep looking at it and seeing legs and arms hanging down

Weekend bump.

Just in case there's any doubt, this is an as-new, unused lens. It'll have to go on eBay soon, but I'd rather sell it to someone here.

Yes, me too - very nasty.

Not the same as the gentler effect of the clipping I was referring to before.

Using the Picasa viewer, I get that too, which is indeed horrible. Picasa is a bit funny with DNGs, though - it wouldn't display K-5 ones properly at all till recently, so heaven knows what it does with them.

I can't believe that's what Mike's seeing - the clipping is bad enough

You've overexposed the sky a bit - the blue and green channels are clipping a bit at the bright end. Hence the blue on the right, cyan in the middle, white on the left.

I suppose you could call it three bands in that sense, that merge into one another.

Is that what you mean?

I used to get it all the time on the K10D, it drove me crazy until I got used to exposing for sky, not foreground. The K-5 is much better in that regard.

I think it was the...

If PentaxUK is genuinely speaking for Pentax, then her first post is clearly intended to be helpful.

However, without an introduction, it's hard to know much, other than to speculate that perhaps she isn't all that used to forums.

In which case, the meaning of "You are kidding right?!" isn't all that obvious, and could easily be construed other than how you meant it.

I agree that the rest of your post is perfectly reasonable, except that people not used to forums will also not be used to the term 'troll', so might take that in a way not intended too.

However, we should be cultivating actual Pentax people, not haranguing them, at least until they've come to realise that certain people can be a little blunt occasionally, yet mean only well by it.

Life's way too short for that, if you have Digital ICE on your scanner

Did they come from specks of dust on the negs?

I get lots of white spots on scans if I don't have Digital ICE switched on.