A rare "I love Ebay" moment:

Pentax-M 50mm f2 with fungus, £5
Pentax MV1 with jammed selector, £5
Pentax AF160, £2

Building a fully functional camera outfit for £12 (plus a few minutes with cotton buds, vinegar, and fresh grease for the selector dial): Priceless!

The MV1 doesn't seem hugely sought after now. On the surface you can see why, it's Av auto only (with manual 1/100 and B settings) and doesn't even tell you what shutter speed it plans to use, instead showing you a green light if it's safe hand held or an amber one if you should use a tripod with extra red lights to show if the exposure is beyond its abilities or that the flash is ready.

But when I saw this one for £5 with a stuck selector dial I decided to rescue it. The lens was a similar purchase some months ago with a bit of fungus which cleaned out easily enough. I've un-jammed the selector, it all works and sounds accurate enough to try a film:

[IMG]http://i183.photobucket.com/albums/x21/Kingofthemountains/IMGP4629.jpg[/IMG]

I now have two of these bodies through similar circumstances, this is the nicer of the two although they both work. The other has a marked focusing screen which I can't work out how to replace (got a spare, just needs fitting). I also picked up an AF160 for a fiver at the same time, which I used to take this photo.

Film photography for less than the price of a good meal, and it'll wipe the floor with those Holga things!

My scanner produces 2400x1600 JPGs, which print ok up to A4. Whether they're "competition standard" I don't know, but they look pretty decent hanging on the wall!

I'm definitely leaning toward the conclusion that it's impossible to come up with any hard rules for composition. It's entirely subjective. I keep meeting people who did GCSE photography ages ago and inevitably they've picked up the personal preferences of their teacher, which they now assume to be the only "right way". I even had one complain that my B&W images were "too grey". Clearly their teacher regarded the developing times as a suggestion and doubled them!

There is no right or wrong way. If the results are properly exposed and pleasing to your eye (and hopefully at least a few others) then you're doing it right.

It is interesting from a psychological viewpoint however to see that there seem to be a few things which western humans are conditioned to find pleasing in an image, be it diagonals, thirds, or whatever. That's why, providing you like the results, chances are that other people will too.

One thing I've never been entirely sure of is whether the £18 limit is for the goods or goods and postage? Given that it's Her Majesty's Highwaymen I suspect they make the rules up depending on how they feel, as there's little or no accountability!

You can buy a film scanner for around the £100 mark, it won't be as good as ChrisA's but it'll do a reasonable job. I have, however, noticed how much detail it loses from the slides I recently fed through it. I may well try to digitise them by projecting and then photographing with the K-m instead.

You can definitely buy slide copier attachments with a K mount, that might be worth a try? It's dead easy to flip positive/negative once you have the digital images and the slide frames are, after all, the same size as a 35mm one so they should fit although you might have to make a mask from black card to fill the space around the frame. Only thing I'm unsure of is whether you'd hit problems with the crop factor?

Sorry, but IIRC 2nd hand items are still liable for import duty?

To the best of my knowledge all items with a value of over £18 imported via mail order from non-EU states are liable for VAT/duty/Parcelfarce's cut of the profits.

One trick you may be able to use - have a look at panorama stitching software like Hugin

I made this earlier using two shots taken with my DA 35mm and said software:

[IMG]http://i183.photobucket.com/albums/x21/Kingofthemountains/Landscapes/IMGP4619-IMGP4620.jpg[/IMG]

With some lenses the widest aperture isn't bad for grab shots. I know I'm always on about the K 28mm/3.5 but it works astonishingly well at f3.5 and infinity for most larger subjects (anything car sized or larger will be in focus at infinity by the time you have all of it in the frame).

I'd have thought the split screen would make things worse?

I know the cheap one I had was horrible in that it made the viewfinder very dark. I get the impression that they were fine on 35mm as the viewfinder was physically larger so would naturally gather more light, making up for the dark bit in the middle.