I started in 1980 with a Zenit EM. Use the Spotmatic to learn on as it is totally manual.
I repair professional photo gear for a living and I've noticed more people are using film again.
What do you need help with? Just load your camera and shoot some film. I've been having fun using an Olympus Trip 35 recently.
Try "The 35mm Photographer's a Handbook" . There's also lots of stuff on film photography on YouTube.

I have a few thousand 35mm transparencies and film strips which I E6 processed and never mounted. I don't want to copy all of them but I do want to make copies of quite a few.
I have a flat bed scanner with a 35 mm adaptor but it's slow and the results are poor.
Here's a bit of fun. A Self portrait taken in February 1996 through my bathroom mirror. This was on Jessop ISO 100 slide film. I flipped the image in Photoshop. I was 29 years old and still had hair....Happy days!
Anyway, I used a desk lamp with a white piece of plastic acting as a diffuser, and a SMC-M 100mm f4 macro lens.

So, is it really a great deal better than the K5?

I must admit that I have the 35mm f2.4 and the 21mm f3.2. They are both excellent lenses IMHO.

It may be worth replacing all of the light seals. I did a Canon AE1 for a friend today.
Don't forget to replace the mirror damper too!

In my experience, most vintage Pentax prime lenses perform very well indeed. Don't forget some B&W emulsions were extremely fine grained and they would probably be the equivalent of more megapixels than the new K3.
Did you ever shoot Velvia or Kodachrome 25?

I prefer primes. The only zooms I have are the cheap ones kitted with the K-x and I seldom use them. I have a growing collection of SMC-M and Super / SMC Takumar lenses and I enjoy swapping and changing them when I'm using my cameras.
I shoot in manual mode and meter with the green button, it's not a hassle for me to do this because I grew up using a Zenit EM.

Decent zoom lenses are expensive. I remember, during a lens training course at Nikon, putting a 24-70mm f2.8 on a back projector and viewing a resolution chart on a huge ground glass screen. It was a pro lens and the corners were sharp even at f2.8, so you certainly do get what you pay for.

Right, I've just tightened the rear group ring and it's pretty sharp now!
I'm quite embarrassed really for assuming they are all this bad and for not realising what the problem was in the first place.
The camera body was front focusing too, so it was a combination of these two things in addition to the fact that I was in a hurry!

Hi All,

Having just received this lens, I thought it would be interesting to test it on my K-r test body.
I was surprised at the amount of CA at f3.5. The attached photo is a 100% crop from the centre of the image. By f5.6 this clears up but it never achieves a particularly high order of sharpness.
I wonder if this is a bad sample?

I've come over from Nikon. I prefer the ergonomics of Pentax, I still have my old PK-M and M42 lenses and you get better value for money from Pentax.
I don't care how good people think Canon cameras are, in my experience they always go wrong. The T90 was groundbreaking but find one that still works perfectly like my 1982 ME Super does.