I was trying that, sometimes it worked and sometimes it would hold it for ten seconds or so, then give up. I'm used to having to do that from when I used the Casio compact, which although a fast compact (for its age), was nowhere near fast enough to capture a moving race car. Trouble is, sometimes it's really hard to make it hit the specific bit you want.

I remember when I was first looking at lenses, which would have been late 70s or early 80s, and recall something like a 1000mm mirror lens being advertised for about £45! Can't remember the name, I recall it sounded a bit cheap, but it was on my "I want" list at that time. Back then I wanted a Konica Autoreflex T4, based mainly on getting the brochure and seeing all the stuff they made for it.

I just got a used Tamron 500mm mirror lens for my K-x from the classified section of the forum, and tried it out at the Cholmondeley Pageant of Power this last weekend. I was a bit worried at the requirement for a tripod, various web comments about it being f8, but I was quite pleased with the results. Probably not the best technical shots, but acceptable to me at least.

These two are handheld, first of all:

[IMG]http://i10.photobucket.com/albums/a149/hpfirenza/cpop2011/IMGP1673-web.jpg[/IMG]

[IMG]http://i10.photobucket.com/albums/a149/hpfirenza/cpop2011/IMGP1686-web.jpg[/IMG]

And then I remembered I wanted to play with the "catch in focus" feature on the camera.

[IMG]http://i10.photobucket.com/albums/a149/hpfirenza/cpop2011/IMGP1821-web.jpg[/IMG]

[IMG]http://i10.photobucket.com/albums/a149/hpfirenza/cpop2011/IMGP1832-web.jpg[/IMG]

So overall, a pretty good buy. If anything it worked better than an auto-focus especially for the track shots, my AF zoom was continually trying to decide whether to focus on the near bales, the far bales, and very rarely on the car in between them.

Feel free to critique the above, any comments welcome.

Sold to me. PMs exchanged, look forward to having a play with this.

You're not kidding there. And not just the station.

I hadn't realised there was a steam special this weekend. I was out taking some photos of the last one I knew about, but the catenary on the WCML gets in the way unfortunately.

3 and 5 for me, I think, because the view of the bird is more complete and there is less "fuss" in the background.

Yes, I don't know what's happened there, can't imagine that many people looking at it. I hadn't realised you'd replied just now, as I deleted the post. I'll look for somewhere else to post it.

Mods - can you delete the thread please and I'll post again when I've sorted the hosting?

From the Cathedrals Express, Saturday 16th April. Too much trackside furniture on the West Coast Main Line, unfortunately.

[IMG]http://i10.photobucket.com/albums/a149/hpfirenza/General/Imgp0879crop-web.jpg[/IMG]

[IMG]http://i10.photobucket.com/albums/a149/hpfirenza/General/Imgp0914crop-web.jpg[/IMG]

[IMG]http://i10.photobucket.com/albums/a149/hpfirenza/General/IMGP0885-web.jpg[/IMG]

This is using the KX and kit 18-55 lens. I was intending to try out the Tamron 70-300, but then found I was too close to the trackside to need it. Nothing particularly stunning in the way of images unfortunately, though I quite like the last one. I found it quite challenging (a challenge which I generally failed) to hit the right moment while the logo was between gantries.

No, it's me. I had in mind that the old card showed capacity for 400-odd images, when in fact it's 149 in 4Gb, and the new one is 1150-odd, which is about right, roughly 8x the smaller card. I think I'm getting the 400-odd from my compact.

Sorry, that's not what I meant. I was looking at the number of available photos on the LCD display, and though I don't recall the numbers, I was expecting the move from a 4Gb card to 32Gb card to give me roughly 8x the number of available photos. Before I go any further I guess I need to put the two cards in and check I'm not imagining things.

I've been in computers since 1982 and been through the old "when is a megabyte not a megabyte" thing.

I must admit that my magazine consumption is generally limited to whatever I can get on a "special offer". For example I've just finished a "five issues for a fiver" promotion on Digital SLR Photographer, 3 for a pound on Octane (classy classic car mag, good photography), that kind of thing, and I know that in a couple of months I'll be able to do the same offer again, so out of the year I only miss a small number of issues.

There has to be something spectacularly interesting in a magazine for me to pay cover price. Partly this is because I can't bear to throw out these mags once I have them, and partly because they all seem to be nearly a fiver an issue.

DSLRP is quite nice, but there's a lot of advertising that I never look at because prices are generally out of date by the times it's printed, that said I did find the supplier of my KX in there. I got some copies of AP from the library sale a bit ago (ten issues for a pound) and managed to consolidate them down into about ten pages of useful (to me) stuff.