Some folk never fail to amaze me!

Excellent set of entries and well done on the judging David - I didn't envy you that task!

Well done Aiki - that's one of the nicest photos I've seen posted in this fortnightly competition so I'm glad you won. Look forward to the next theme

That's not a bad price and no there won't be additional taxes.

The Pentax may be expensive compared to the Canon and Nikon lenses you mention, but it is generally thought to be one of the best 50mm lenses made for any camera system. So you're getting better quality for your money

I've got a Manfrotto 460MG and if you decide to go for a 3-way then I'd recommend it. It's comparatively lightweight and compact but it's still very flexible - never regretted buying mine and I've had it for around 6 years now.

It's a nice dynamic fireworks picture with a decent amount of foreground interest (something that's usually lacking in such shots) so good work there.

I think you'd probably get more comments if you posted the picture into the thread though:

The picture you linked to was taken in Manual Exposure mode and looks like it was underexposed and then pushed in PP to bring the levels back up. If you shoot manually you only tend to use the meter as a rough guide - he's picked his actual settings himself so you can't draw any conclusions I'm afraid.

I've sold two of those in the last 12 months (both silver) and got £97 and £115 for them - that was a very good price indeed unfortunately!

The ppi bit only makes any difference when you're specifying a size in inches or mm. If you're specifying a size in pixels then 800x300 at 72ppi is exactly the same as 800x300 at 300ppi, 240ppi, 0.5ppi, 12,457,896ppi, figure-of-your-choice-ppi...

If you made a picture of 8 inches x 10 inches at 72ppi then it would measure 576 pixels by 720 pixels, if you made the same picture (8"x10") at 300ppi then it would measure 2400 pixels by 3000 pixels. That's when you want to start worrying about ppi.

So in summary; when saving for web just select the size in pixels (800x600 or whatever) and ignore ppi, when saving for print select the size in inches/cm/mm and go as high a ppi figure as you can without losing image quality (generally not worth going above 300 though as that's pretty much at the limit of what human eyes can perceive).

Not "in-camera" on a K10 - none of those flashy colour extraction special effects here!

All items that remain in the same position in *all* the frames will remain solid - everything else will appear "ghost-like" to one degree or another.

In addition to the tips Prieni an RaV give above, here's one I got from Don a couple of years back:

Take a three image multiple exposure. In the first shot use a red filter over the lens, a blue filter in the second shot and a green filter in the third. Anything that has remained still during all three shots will appear as normal (a combination of the R, G and B images) whereas items that have moved (clouds are great for this) will take on spooky and surreal colour casts. Takes a bit of trial and error but can give some great results.