Argos are selling Pentax lenses. But after reading the Technical details, scroll down a bit, I don't think I'll be buying it.

Of all the 'technical' bullet points, it seems that the one that simply says 'standard lens' is one of only very few of their techincal specs that are in any way accurate.

And the price is a bit steep.

link

I have a K30 and this lens, they work perfectly well together.

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I like 1. It starts to tell a story but leaves me to finish it. I find myself wondering whether or not he knows her. When I start down that train of thought (no pun intended) I decide he doesn't, and the expression on his face is saying 'I knew I should have found a seat to myself'.

Sadly it looks like there are no settings for a program line on the K30 - but some test photos taken in P mode have come out fairly well.

It seems to operate on a very low shutter speed, though, and when I try to speed it up, it switched to shutter speed priority mode.

Thanks Ken. Sorry to hijack my own thread with what's probably a simple question - but what is program mode? I've looked in the manual but it's not clear - 'sets exposure according to the program line' is about the best I can wring out of it. Not prone to over-elaboration in those manuals are they?

I get sensitivity priority, aperture, exposure priorities, auto, bulb but that seems to cover all the bases - in program mode, what preference do I set, and what does the camera do for me?

Sorry!

Done and dusted as it turns out - link broken.

Thanks McGreg - I will. Perhaps I should have been clearer, sorry, I've just obtained a Mecablitz 50 from the forum so have a little room for learning and manouvre.

I've played with the settings and worked out how to use P-TTL, and also the HSS mode, but just wanted to make sure I wasn't doing anything silly - I'm taking photos at a big occasion tomorrow and, as I've never really done it before, wanted to make sure I don't make any silly mistakes.

Will mainly be photographing kids, playing and moving around a lot, in a large hall that will probably be tungsten lit.

I've never used anything other than full manual mode on the camera and I'm pretty used to that now so don't mind messing around with settings.

Thanks for that - so - just point and click!

I suspect that in the environments I intend to use it - where there is usually already artificial light - the 'spoil' of the ambient light isn't as harsh as in natural light, because artificial light is much uglier than natural light anyway.

So thank you - I think the message is 'trust 1/180 because it's not, in these circumstances, as slow as you think'.

Flash photography is going to be an interesting journey for me - I've already been surprised by the quality of some 'flash assisted' images I've taken around the house today - and obviously the actual technical image quality is so much higher at lower ISO.

Thanks again.

Hi,

Hoping for some advice. I've kind of come through the ranks with digital cameras, a simple point and shoot, then a Canon Powershot that really helped me learn the fundamentals then the K30 I have now.

I've never trusted flashes, mainly because I only ever had built in ones and the results were always very ... point and shoot-y.

But now I've, through this forum, decided to get an external flash that can help me, mostly inside, when the light's so marginal that it requires ISO that's just, in my opinion, too high.

It'll be mainly used to photograph my daughter, who is young, and moves around a lot. Quickly.

So what I want / need to know, is, what's this 1/180 thing all about? Why, in P-TTL mode, can't I set a quicker exposure? Surely the whole point of a flash is to do the things that wouldn't be possible with unaided light levels?

I'm not sure if, say at a party in a hall full of kids running around, 1/180 will be quick enough to avoid motion blur - so I guess I'm going to have to go to the high speed sync option.

I seem to have no choice in this - but is that what high speed sync is really for?

Sorry for the long post, but a few words of advice, just to get me going in the right direction, would be much appreciated.

Where possible I'd like to use as much ambient light as possible, the idea being I just point the flash at the ceiling or a wall, and just give what light there is a bit of a helping hand.