I took mine out this afternoon and fired off the first six shots of a roll of slide film. Should be some moody atmospheric stuff of a bridge that crops up in more than a few car magazines.

I suspect your daughter might be more impressed with something like a P30t (which in itself is a bit of an oddball - Pentax offering a new manual wind manual focus body a year after replacing the SF series), there's just much more of a feeling of control when you have to wind on and focus manually.

Generally you deal with the weather by planning around it. Chucking down with rain? Get the tripod and that widget you thought would make a good macro subject out, and make the kitchen table your studio for the afternoon.

I did smile at the comments in one photography magazine about visiting the Elan Valley and how quickly the weather can change. I can be up there in about 20mins if the weather looks promising!

Seconded. I'm planning to start saving for one of these next, as I now have a good spread of manual primes.

Mine either live in Lowepro lens cases (with a silica gel sachet in every case, usually in the mesh pocket in the lid) or in my gear bag (which also has a couple of gel packets inside).

Generally the trick seems to be to open the cases up and use the lenses once in a while, let the air circulate and don't put them away wet. Also worth letting them come back up to room temperature before putting them back in the bag if, say, you've just been outside shooting night snow scenes.

Be honest though, we've all looked at an awful lot of 50mm f2 lenses because the owner listed it as "f1:2" or similar manglings!

Ahh, is that who it is? For some reason I thought it was the branch of the LCE there that held the franchise.

There's a Pentax Pro dealer in Chester too IIRC?

There are some videos that the world needs to see, but that the world probably doesn't want to see. That would be one of them.

I will have a difficult time photographing any USAF Apaches at RIAT this year, after seeing how their crews behave.

It's odd how it goes. I'm not as keen on the AF film bodies as I am on the manual/mechanical ones. If I could take my SFX or my MX out for the afternoon then the MX will always win due to being a perfectly engineered little gem. The SFX just feels as though it's hiding things, although it has a much better LCD readout than many other cameras of the era (I always struggle with bodies that don't indicate their chosen aperture in Program mode).

Ian, there is a battery grip for the SFX/SFXn to allow it to use conventional AAs, it makes the handgrip slightly larger but it means you can use readily available batteries. Mine is currently using the old Energiser Lithiums from my K-m.

The only thing I do when fitting manual lenses is to switch to manual focus - simply because I worry about the AF screw drive grinding on the lens mount as I fit them and then being held back.

You'll need to change a menu option in order to allow the use of the aperture ring, otherwise the camera will not shoot. In M mode you'll need to use stop-down metering - basically you select the aperture, press the green button, the camera will then stop down and take a meter reading before offering a shutter speed. In general the metering is accurate at apertures of f11 or larger, when you go to a smaller aperture you need to fiddle around a bit to get it right as it tends to underexpose. Digital Preview mode is very handy for checking the exposure before taking the shot.