You'll probably find that the ROHS stuff has nothing to do with radiation but is in fact related to lead. I know a lot of perfectly harmless items have screaming warning labels about how they "contain chemicals known to the state of California to cause cancer, birth defects..." which are in fact things like brass, lead solder, and so on. They pose no threat to human health providing you don't attempt to eat them (and TBH I don't think the risk of cancer would be your biggest problem if you'd just consumed a teleconverter)!

I strongly suspect that Pentax have upgraded the SDM technology a lot since the earlier much-reported failures, as all the reports I read seem to relate to older designs (and are often lenses bought some years ago).

I would wonder if the mobile phone boxes are selling to people attempting to sell on their old phone? Slightly odd I'll admit but it's the only theory I can come up with (apart from a variant of Ken's suggestion!)

I'd never heard of them before, so went to investigate...

Very odd! I don't really think it's their fault though - they have obviously chosen to make their money from mass market portrait photography, presumably on a "get 'em through as fast as you can" basis. That wouldn't allow any room for creative or innovative portraits so they will all look identical and very twee. I doubt they offer styling advice to their customers, so what you see is the fact that there are a lot of clueless people out there who don't realise what their idea of a smile in those clothes looks like (Bates Motel management in some cases, Hillbilly in others!)

The problem is that there are large numbers of people out there with utterly appalling taste. They're the ones who buy the hideous clocks advertised in tabloid newspaper supplements, love Jack Vettriano (nothing against the chap, wish I could make that much money, but I can't stand his work!) and think that these portraits are the height of style.

See, I think some things work well in black and white. Architecture and industrial stuff for instance, as the lack of colour brings out the shapes and textures.

I've never converted digital shots to B&W though - if I want B&W I use film, as the whole experience of using something like a KX, processing the film on the kitchen worktop, then scanning the negatives is great fun.

I don't think there'll be such a thing as retirement when I get there!

Problem is, the retirement age hasn't taken account of the fact that people live much longer now than they used to. In the old days you were lucky if you lasted five years after giving up work, now people commonly live for ten or twenty years afterwards. There just isn't the money in the system to pay for that, so either the retirement age has to go up or people need to pay more into pensions.

I see the "Holiday snapshot of people in front of the subject" one all the time. I can't fathom why! It's a rugged, remote hillside with a lake - why do you think it'll be improved by a grinning human shoved in the frame? It's as if they're worried that people won't believe they've been to these places unless they put someone in the photo.

I am getting better at things like:

Making sure there are no ramblers in luminous orange raincoats in the shot (had one waddling along while staring at thin air with binoculars last week, took ages for them to move!)

Waiting for the passing car to move out of frame before pressing the button.

I realise foreground interest/any interest when dealing with an otherwise empty landscape can help, but to me that's something like managing to include your car or friends in the bottom corner of the shot, just to give the photo a bit of a story. They shouldn't dominate half the frame, and to me it's better if the viewer has to actively look for them as it shows the scale of the landscape.

*has just been to look up said castle* Ahh, that one!

Think a bulldozer might struggle to fit over the bridge? I know there's a Vulcan in dire need of funding which might be available to hire for a few hours...

Our printer decided to trash two pages of photo paper recently, after the red and yellow nozzles blocked causing images to come out in blue. Most annoying as one of them was the not-inexpensive canvas effect stuff which looks great but isn't easy to come by.

Just get a few K series primes. The K 55mm f1.8 on my K-m demolished the best Minolta 50mm on a friend's A900!

It also comes down to printer quality. I recently had to do a major nozzle clean on the big printer (Epson Stylus CX3600) but it still won't touch the Canon IP90 I use with Pictbridge to print the best photos out.