Against that, a nice Rum Daiquiri will be super cold.

G

Nowadays any film gives a retro feel!

G

Find a dark room, put your widest angle lens on the camera (and the flash gun), and set a small aperture. Take a number of pictures of the wall at different zoom settings (I'm assuming you can adjust the zoom manually).

You should end up with a number of pictures of the wall which will show how the flash illuminates the wall at the different zoom settings.

G

Actually Mac, I stuck pretty well to my lens buying moratorium. And I bought the K10D without a lens. My New Year resolution is to finally get down to it and flog all the lenses I don't use, which is most of them.

The ones I do use are:

31mm - a great normal lens on digital
77mm - my favourite
K 50mm 1:1.2 - for soft portraits and low light
F 50mm 1.4 - mainly for portraits
F* 300mm - for wildlife
FA 100mm 1:2.8 - for macro
FA 20mm - around town

I would use the 12-24mm if only Pentax would repair it.

For trips I take the 24-90 and F 70-210.

Used occasionally are the M 400mm and the FA* 200mm.

The rest are on the block, as soon as I get round to it.

G

Reading my K10D manual.

G

What Pentax "fitment"?

There is no 70mm macro on the roadmap.

G

It's worth keeping an eye on Ebay, and remembering that for many macro applications you don't need AF, or super-multi-coating, or even open-aperture metering.

Some of the older Pentax and Asahi macro lenses were very good indeed, such as the M series, and even the screw-mount Takumars and Super-Takumars.

The K, M and A 50mm and 100mm macros were superb, and can often be had for very little money. And if you are not shooting fast-moving creepy-crawlies, 50mm can be perfectly satisfactory.

For those of us who like to follow the Riley Rule, Pentax has plenty of possibilities, and they are not all DA lenses.

G

I don't enjoy reading messages where the writer is too idle to press the Caps Lock key.

G

The reason that I (for one) unashamedly, and not entirely good-humouredly, bash Canon is for their bully-boy marketing tactics.

G

I'm not sure I agree with this.

First, the mathematics. 5x4 is 5 times larger than 645 (in area), or roughly 2.5 times in height.

The same ratios for 35mm are 14 times and 4 times.

I think the height ratio is the one to use. If it is comfortable to view an A4 print at, say, 75cms, then a print that was 4 times the height should be viewed from 4 times the distance, say 3 metres.

I don't know about you, but I don't think my eyes would be able to tell the difference between the two, unless I were to go closer to the large print. If I were to do that, I would no longer see the "big picture"; in other words, I would lose the wood and just see the pixels, sorry, trees.

But then, I am a little short-sighted. It may be that younger, eagle-eyed, audiences would gain from seeing a print from the larger format. I unfortunately, wouldn't.

G