Alright. I'm buying a small screwdriver set tonight so I can disassemble the flash unit from the bottom. I hope this works.

I don't want anyone to take this thread too seriously. But something's been bothering me for a while.

I wish Pentax offered a line of professional level bodies. The current highest-end body is the K7. A wonderful, masterfully designed machine, but with some focus-tracking and high-iso issues.

I think the success of the K10, and the innevitable success of the K7 will get some cashflow into Pentax's coffers, and maybe we'll start to see some really high-end bodies produced. Oh, how I would LOVE to have to option of buying a super highly-engineered Pentax body that could rival the Canon 1 series or the Nikon D_ series. Charge an appropriate price and just manufacture it already, Pentax! I know you're technologically capable! The k10 and K7 are building a consumer base to support it. Just do it already! As a photograpger who makes his living using Pentax gear, I'd be the first to buy. And I know a few people personally who would also jump on it.

Sorry for the rant.

After shooting a wedding two nights ago, I went home and tried to take my AF540 flash off of my K7 body, but it's stuck. It's very severely stuck. This flash has been difficult to take off before, but after some muscle, I have been able to free it. But not this time. I have been wiggling, retightening/untightening, yanking, pulling, grunting and cursing, and none of it is working.

Has anybody heard of this happening? I fear that if I continue to muscle it too hard, I'm going to actually break something.

Ooh! I've got one. While shooting a coal mine for an article, my AF540 flash fell out of my hand onto the stone ground. I heard a crunch and a tinkling of plastic parts bouncing all over the hard ground in the darkness. I cringed, but kept my composure, because I didn't want to "drop an f-bomb" in front of the clients.

Luckily, the clinking plastic parts I heard were just from the fold-out diffuser, which had broken off. I always shoot with an umbrella or scrim, so I never use that thing anyway. Everything else on the flash still works fine to this day. Woo!

Exactly. So you're saying I should try it?

I bought my first roll of film the other day. I'm sick of only having experience from one end of the photography spectrum, so I've expanded my horizons by purchasing a 36 roll of Kodak 400 Tmax B&W for my K1000(Which I originally only bought because of the lens attached to it).

It's fun so far. It's very strange to have so little feedback as you shoot; just a little lightmeter in the viewfinder. With this machine, I doubt I could accurately predict what a flash will do to my exposure, but I want to try one anyway if I can.

All I have is the Pentax AF540. Apparently, modern flashguns send less voltage through the body than old flashguns. So my K1000 is probably safe, but is there anything that could damage my flashgun if I use it on there?

Putting the flashgun in slave mode 2 seems to allow me to use my flash as I want. This is great. I guess issue #2 is off of the list. Thank you everybody! Thank you very much!

Hmm, I didn't know about Slave modes 1 and 2 on my flashgun. Neat! That will be useful.

But how do I put my K10's popup flash on manual mode? I've looked and looked for that feature but never found it. Everyone I've ever talked to about it said it didn't exist as well.

But are they wrong? It would be fan-freaking-tastic if I could put my popup on manual mode! Oh God that would be nice!

I love this thing and I wouldn't trade it for anything else on the market right now, but here are two flaws which exist in the K10 not because of technical limitations, but because someone in the lab either intentionally thought it should function this way, or they just plain goofed badly.

1. The Raw button toggle is unreliable and not fully functional. Let's say you've set your camera to Jpg and you want to start shooting Raw+Jpg, you hit the button and there you have it. Marvelous! What a great idea this little button is! You can shoot in this mode as much as you like now. BUT if you now hit the play(► button to review your image, it disables the mode! That doesn't make any sense and it's a nuisance, because images are often reviewed after they are shot, so you have to reactivate the mode every time.

Furthermore, if you are already in Raw+Jpg via the menu, this button does nothing at all when pressed; It becomes useless. It SHOULD toggle to plain Jpg mode. That's logically what it should do.

There's no reason for this feature to be behaving the way it does. None.

2. You can not use the onboard flash in wireless mode if you do not have a modern lens attached to the body. This is a huge annoyance for me. I like to have my AF540 off of the camera body when I shoot, so I use the onboard flash as the optical trigger. BUT you cannot be in wireless mode if the camera can't use P-TTL, which is fine for some purposes, but what about us folks who like to put their off-body flash units in manual mode and don't need any metering?

I have two vintage Asahi lenses as well as an extension tube set and because of this flaw, I cannot use any of those things with off-camera lighting. All the onboard flash has to do it fire to trigger the off-camera flashguns, that's it; no metering required. So why the hell can't I do it?

I think I should ask Pentax themselves about this. I wonder what they'd say.

Yeah, I thought it might have been the distances as well, so I set up my studio strobes across the room and the Pentax 540 flashgun in front of me - so that it would receive the strongest flash. It still misfired.

By the way, here is photographic proof that this has worked:




See it bigger here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/dubiousdrewski/2433741088/

My studio lights are beside me and my pentax flashgun is sitting on the floor to the right behind the bag. All of my lights were off camera and working fine while being triggered by the internal flash. I've done this a thousand times. Argh! What's changed?!