That's tempting - and probably about as close as I'll ever get!

Good point! Unfortunately today's kidney exchange rate wouldn't see me raise enough for a wheel nut...

How can I afford a Bugatti..?

I'm a confirmed petrol-head so, in celebration of a new series of Top Gear starting on Sunday, this fortnight's competition is CARS.

This should be a nice open topic although I do have an extra rule in addition to the usual fortnightly ones (one entry each, no changing once posted, picture(s) taken between now and the end of the competition, Pentax equipment used, full shooting data given); that is that the subject must be car or car related. They can be real cars, toy cars, car parts, whatever you like but NOT bikes, trains, planes, vans, lorries, busses, space shuttles, etc. Just cars. Everyone clear on that? Good.

Entries close at 6pm (GMT) on Wednesday 25th November. Good luck all!

A win? Cool!

Thanks for that Tim, it's very much appreciated! And yes, you can detect some camera shake but in my defence they were 5-10 second exposures made handheld in the freezing cold; tricky not to shake a little bit...

Congratulations to all my fellow entrants - an excellent standard as usual.

Poppies are quite amazing plants; their seeds can lay dormant deep underground for huge lengths of time (over 100 years!) until activated by the soil they lie in being churned and their subsequent exposure to light. Normally this is as a result of ploughing a field, however, it also happens after a tract of land has been heavily shelled in battle.

This is why poppies (or at least the red flowered Corn poppy - a common weed in Europe) tend to appear when the fighting stops and are associated with war. This has been noted for thousands of years and the poppy was widely used as a symbol of death and resurrection in Greco-Roman mythology. Poppies also have a habit of popping up on freshly dug graves and around building sites for the same reasons.

The current Remembrance Day poppies may have their roots (excuse the pun) in Flanders Fields but the symbology predates those events by quite a lot longer...

Guy was pleased with his work...

[IMG]http://i223.photobucket.com/albums/dd37/hefty1969/competition%20stuff/fawkes.jpg[/IMG]

Mask (downloaded from here): K10D | DA35 | ISO100 | f/11 | 15 seconds | taken 11-11-09

Fireworks: K10D | DA12-24 | ISO100 | f/8 | Bulb (various times) | taken 07-11-09

All mixed together in Photoshop 5. Special thanks to scissors, glue and my explosives vendor

The MZ5 has a proper pentaprism finder whereas the MZ50 had a (cheaper to make) pentamirror I believe. The pentamirrors offer a lower magnification as a rule, hence the difference you saw.

Two figures to look for with viewfinders are magnification and coverage. Coverage (as mentioned above) is the proportion of the image seen by the film/sensor that you can see through the viewfinder (100% shows you everything, 90% means the edges are cut off). Magnification is the size of the image compared to the film/sensor (so 1x would imply a projected image the same size as the sensor/film area, 0.75x implies a projected image three-quarters the size of the film/sensor).

You'd think, given that information, that the ideal viewfinder would have a magnification of 1x and 100% coverage - you'd be wrong. A viewfinder with those stats would actually be quite hard to use as your eye would be unable to take in the entire scene in one go without moving your head right back, at which point there's little need for 1x magnification. Hence all viewfinders are subject to design compromises to make something that's useful but also comfortable to look through.

It's a whole topic in its own right...

It's not a "common" fault but stuck pixels can happen from time-to-time with any LCD panel. I think the screen on the K-7 is sourced from Sony so blame them...

Vivitar (Europe) went down the pan around a year ago and all the stock held here in the UK (mostly compact digicams but a few flashes and other accessories too) were put up for public auction by the liquidators. I was intending to go but never made it in the end. There is nobody importing/distributing Vivitar kit here any more but, of course, these situations can always change...

But not sold in the UK.

Unfortunately, if you bought one from the US / Canada by the time duties have been paid it would end up costing as much as the Metz 48 (which is better specified and would carry a UK/EU warranty).