Kim said: As to relieving the spring, surely it is better to store them at min aperture as the spring works to close the aperture?

Absolutely right. That's what I meant to say. It's been a hard week!

G

Having once lost a lens to fungus, I now keep my lenses in an open display cabinet, where silica gel is unnecessary. They're also more accessible that way, and (to a photographer) look very impressive. (It helps to have lots!)

I have been told that lenses should be stored bottom up, with the aperture wide open (or on "A"), so as not to stress the iris spring.

George

Once you get hooked, you'll probably want to get a dedicated macro lens.
The good news is that just about all prime macro lenses (even Sigma!) are very good. The Pentax ones are all superb, and the Tamron 2.5 90 is very highly regarded.

Ignore macro zooms. Sharpness is paramount.

Longer macro lenses are generally better for bugs, which is why second-hand ones sell for more than the otherwise excellent 50mm lenses.

Auto-focus and aperture-automation tend to be pretty unimportant, so something like the Pentax-M 100mm f4.0 is a pretty good, and pretty economical, choice.

And, of course, you can still use the extension rings if you want to get REALLY close.

George

I get the impression you don't do anything to the image once you have downloaded it.

The light in this picture is rather dull, but some quick adjustments to contrast, gamma, saturation, and sharpening make it look very much better.

If you don't have a program that enables you to do this, download Irfanview (and the plugins). Its free at http://www.irfanview.com

Then load the program, open the picture and go into the "Image" menu and then the "enhance colours" menu. Using the sliders, take the gamma to 1.2, the contrast to 20, and the saturation to 70. Click OK, then sharpen. Save the result, and you'll be pleasantly surprised.

You are always likely to get this kind of barrel distortion with a relatively cheap zoom lens at its widest angle. Point and shoot cameras do not tend to have lenses of great quality, and the zoom range is often extreme.

If you shoot with the horizon closer to the centre you will minimise the effect, although I concede that will not necessarily help the composition.

Dull days are the enemy of photography. You have found a nice scene; go back to it if you can in the early morning or the evening on a sunny day and shoot it again. You'll be surprised at the difference.

And of course, with a 50mm lens, it provides a poor man's 85mm.

I'm only aware of the 1.7 AF adaptor. I think the Pentax 1.4 adaptors are MF only.

A 1.7 adaptor turns an inexpensive 200mm M lens into 340mm with limited AF. You have to pay a huge amount of money for a good 300mm lens, so whilst the adaptor may not be as good as the real thing, it's a fraction of the price, and the quality isn't too bad.

Just in case anybody else needs it, I came across this on Mark Roberts' site:

http://www.pcinspector.de/smart_media_recovery/uk/welcome.htm

Mark's site contains some useful stuff:

http://www.robertstech.com/pentax.htm

G

If you attach the card to a pc using a card reader. you should (I think) be able to use file recovery software to extract whatever is on the card.

Just don't record anything else on the card meanwhile.