If you want a ballhead, take a look at the Red Snapper one - £50 including a QR plate, takes Arca Swiss-style plates so you can buy different lengths to shift the centre of gravity of the camera/lens on the head.

All metal, very nice to use, handles my K-m with everything from the 35mm f2.4 to a Bigma. They also have excellent customer service skills and deliver very rapidly - even while other suppliers are in the "Holi-daze" between xmas and new year!

Shades of some photos I've taken on still days which could almost be hung either way up, as there was a perfect reflection of the landscape in the water in the foreground!

Anyone else notice that supermarkets put the price of veg oil up as the price of diesel rises?

I ran my Discovery on it briefly without any obvious harm, it wasn't keen on cold starting though and I won't be doing it again. Just wish there was a biodiesel supplier in town - the nearest here all seem to be so far out of the way that any price saving is wiped out by the extra fuel used to find them!

To be fair there are a couple of desirable items in there - isn't the Vivitar Series 1 zoom one of the sought-after ones? The 24-48mm will probably get a good price too as people seem mad for anything wider than 28mm, and the ME Super/50mm f1.7 combo is probably worth £30-£50 providing it works.

From my understanding of asbestos (gained from following a few threads about its removal from preserved railway stock):

As a solid it's relatively harmless providing you don't consume it. The danger comes when it breaks up into fibres which drift around (which is why removal crews wear a sealed suit).

Any exposure to the dust can cause cancer later on. I've heard a tale of someone who was in a contaminated room for less than a minute (before he realised what had happened and got out) and developed the associated cancer twenty or so years later. Two breaths, that's all it took.

I'd be inclined to wear a mask of some sort for urbexing as any protection is better than none at all, it will also protect you from getting a mouthful of dirt or dislodged rust if, say, looking up and attempting to open a hatch.

Mechanically reliable, electronically I'm not so sure! The metering on mine is very idiosyncratic and easily fooled when compared to an MX. A pity, as it's lovely to handle and use aside from that.

I often think Pentax are missing a trick in not having minty examples of the original three K bodies on display along with their latest range. It'd make for a great demonstration of backwards compatibility when you unclip the 55mm f1.8 from the old KM and fit it to the new K5 without any adapters.

I'm waiting for someone to exhibit a Pentax SLR as a work of art in its own right. The Spotmatic would have had as much impact on photography as those arty LP covers did on music, and it's just utterly perfect to handle and use.

I've looked at the 18-35mm before now, only snag is the lack of an aperture ring.

I would be looking seriously at the Samyang 14mm if reviews were a little more unanimous, as that would be usable on everything from my 1970s KX to my K-m.

You can only really tell from experience. I now know what properly exposed Ilford HP5 looks like after developing, but I've shot about twelve rolls of the stuff. I developed a roll of 120 film today which doesn't look right, it's probably only a stop or so out and can easily be rescued after scanning.

B&W film really is dead easy to develop at home. You do need a dark space but TBH I reckon you'd get away with loading it into the tank in a darkened room, at night, with a quilt or thick blanket over you and the film. I know the cupboard I use isn't perfect but it's good enough for the minute or two it takes to load a standard dev tank, and once the film is loaded you can do the rest under normal lighting.

If you can get hold of an Agfa Rondinax tank you don't need any darkness as they load exactly like a camera. You will need a film leader retrieving gadget, or do as I do and use older cameras with manual film rewind then simply stop cranking when you hear the click of the film disengaging from the sprocket.