Why on earth would I want to do that?

All sound advice. I'll ignore the bit on blue skies though, I seek out grey overcast skies. The greyer and stormier the better. I prefer green and grey to green and blue.

I always use different autofocus points when taking head and shoulders portraits. Even when manual focusing (often) I have a point selected for focus confirmation. I can guarantee errors with central focus and recompose. A shallow depth of field and face on a different plane to the sensor (even slightly) make it a certaintly.

I suppose it depends who takes them. It's a simple question but actually a complicated answer as the colour varies quite a bit according to the the time photographed relative to sunset. I find that optimal time varies upon the phase and for maximum detail the shooting window is often quite narrow. Sometimes my images are colour, sometimes b&w and sometimes I add a touch of blue to either. For stitching shots from different phases together then b&w is my best option.

Well I'm still waiting for the right conditions for my high magnification project. It needs to be cold so the air is clear, but it has been unseasonably warm here. I had a practice last night, there was hazy cloud in front of the moon so far from ideal. But it allowed me to decide on my best setup and it does involve the Q with adapted lenses. There is plenty of fine tuning to do but I'm confident that I can get decent results:

The first is just a reference to show the areas photographed in higher magnification:




The area in red is roughly the area covered by this single, uncropped shot. I can get much higher magnification than this, but it becomes very difficult to work with. I might evetunally settle on a bit less. The arrow in the first indicates the Apollo XI landing site, which is just to the right of the larger twin craters in centre shot:




I should be able to get a better shot than that, it was hazy and my shutter speed was a bit low too. Nevertheless the idea is to stitch the full magnification shots and then reduce the size. Like this, which corresponds to the white area in the first shot:




That looks a lot better. And there are vast quantities of pixels to play with. The idea is to photograph the terminator over a dozen nights from the first quarter and last quarter phases and then stitch the out of shadow areas together to give a full moon with full surface detail. I might not achive that but I should at the least be able to get some shots of individual phases capable of very large prints. Full size would be around 30,000 pixels. Reducing that to around 12,000 pixels should result in a very decent quality metre wide print. If I can achieve consistent magnification each time I shoot, then I can build up a library of images which could be stacked to provide something rather impressive, although a 3metre print is probably too big.

What's the point of a technical exercise like this? Not much really, it helps if you like craters.

I would recommend starting without ND filters by using small apertures and low ISO in low light conditions. Pre-dawn, gloomy locations, blue hour.

The rhino was the standout shot for me. As with Puma's shots yesterday we are seeing exceptional quality at high iso, maybe this is where the KIIs' strength lies.

I agree, I'd expect this image quality from a regular K5 and those lenses. It's probably difficult to judge at these small sizes though.

Some other prices have now been reduced such as the DFA100macroWR which is now £449. That's either a very good price reduction of 5% judged against the pre-hike prices or an astonishing reduction of 35% judged against the post hike prices, depending on your viewpoint. I regard it as a very good buy, but not the bargain of a lifetime to be snapped up before the price jumps by a couple of hundred for evermore.

I think a lot of people noticed that the prices of most lenses went up suddenly by a lot. Some of those are now coming back down again, which is welcome news and I think others will too. In such an unstable pricing environment it certainly pays an individual to monitor prices. I would have been very miffed indeed had I paid a 30% premium for a lens that was always going to return to a more normal price.

Thank you for your suggestion but I have no intention of buying other marques, 14 of my 15 lenses are Pentax lenses, including some of their finest glass. One would hope Pentax reads these threads to find out what their customers think. I don't want cheap prices, I want fair prices and stable prices, not wild price swings. Doesn't make me a traitor.

Probably the FA43Ltd, paid full whack for it but it is such a good lens.

Other notable buys for image quality/price bang for buck are my K series lenses, 35mm f3.5 £35 55mm f1.8 £35 and 85mm f1.8 £100.