'My' Spitfire can't equal yours for colour, sharpness, IQ etc. It was taken by a fellow pilot of my father's during the Azerbaijan Crisis of 1946. I've added minimal colour (the aircraft wasn't camouflaged). My father had been in Transport Command, supplying Burma, during the war. As a reservist he was recalled, given an hour's briefing on the differences from flying a Douglas DC3, and then sent off down the runway. All things considered, it's a miracle I'm here!

I used religiously to stick an UV filter on my lenses -- but came to appreciate that cheap filters were worse than none and expensive filters were ... expensive, and could potentially cause problems in certain circumstances. Why run any chance, however slim, of degrading a shot, having spent a considerable amount of money on a decent lens? None of my lenses carry 'protective' filters. Camera retailers are, though, pretty wise to purchasers' understandable wish to do what they can to protect their investment and are very happy to provide these high-margin items to those of a nervous disposition!

An impressive set. Your website, too, has many glories (I refer mainly to the photographic content, but the careful construction and layout of the website itself lends a hand). The hardship of those often early morning rises has paid off handsomely.

... and you can search in both the Classifieds here and on eBay to see what other 55-300s have fetched (use recent prices as a guide; in general, prices of used lenses have dropped over the past couple of years)

I prophesied in a post a while back that the timing of such a camera would be dependent on when (unconvinced Pentax would ever get round to a FF) I reluctantly sold my K5 and associated lenses and bought into a new system. Well, I sold and bought barely two weeks ago ... clearly, triggering Pentax's current announcement.

I'm still a Pentaxian (MX-1) but also now a Nikonian (D810). I doubt I'll be back for another Pentax dslr (changing systems doesn't come cheap!), but I don't doubt Pentax will give the other brands a run for their money with the new FF camera.

To echo comments above, the D810 already has the facility to shoot in crop mode, so that on its own will not be a novel feature of the Pentax. Mind you, I can't see myself ever wanting to use crop mode on a FF -- it's rather like the tail wagging the dog. One area where Pentax could score markedly, based on their track record, is in making a noticeably more compact camera than those offered by the competitor SLRs.

Surely there is more to it than the covering of some contacts. Why would people go to the trouble of hacking the firmware otherwise?

Nos. 2, 3, 4, 11, 12, and 13 now sold

Have broadly to agree with 50mpCMOS, while not minimising the difficulties faced by the likes of Nikon. There may be some cushioning to be had from being a small part of a large company, but that will be temporary unless the financial prospects look good. Pentax is small, bordering on invisible and however good some of its products, with few exceptions, such as the 645Z, none of them is sufficiently distinct from what is already on offer from rivals with better marketing and sales operations. This is a pity, as the K5 range and the K3, eg, are excellent cameras. As a child might say, 'it isn't fair'. Hard to disagree.

But perhaps it's a case for us photographers of living with what we have and enjoying it. Prediction in the absence of detailed data and intimate knowledge of the industry is really no higher than loose speculation.

An interesting set of comments, mostly in support of the way the photograph was achieved. David Trout is absolutely right of course to point out that photographs have been getting manipulated almost since the invention of photography (although dodging and burning are in degree less fundamental than the invention of a scene that we see in the linked photograph).

And I readily concede that as these inventions go, this one is a mild example. Yet this kind of mix and match approach leaves me a little uneasy, even when (as here) the photographer is entirely upfront about what he's done; and indeed (since the thing is called a tutorial) urges others to have a go.

I cannot satisfactorily explain to myself why I should be unhappy about these sorts of confection. After all, I'll happily watch a film like Gravity in the certain knowledge that neither Sandra Bullock nor George Clooney have ever been in Space. I suppose it comes down to wanting a photograph to be 'honest' (however susceptible it may be to varying interpretations), to be rooted in the factual rather than the fictional. To me, the techniques are a shade too close to those used by photographers who deliberately set out to deceive.

It is, to my mind, significantly different to most editing and processing routines -- not perhaps in principle but certainly in degree. It is surely one thing to accentuate the appearance of clouds (to take a mundane example), quite another the import an 'improved' sky.

I guess others will find it hard to agree with this viewpoint. And perhaps 'viewpoint' is a flattering description for something that is almost visceral.

Numbers 2, 3, 11, 12, and 13 now sold