Darlene's new instructions received and the title has been ammended.

It awaits Darlene's final say in her competition - what is the final title to be?

Of course it isn't over yet, but yes, subjects should be wide enough to be do-able and be inclusive of all.

If you think this one is falling by the wayside, then it could be closed off and you could start again, but you might upset anyone who had some entries planned....

There's no guarantee that other manufacturers' lenses will report correctly to the camera.

No it's not Algi, it's a problem with all the DSLRs if the lens is very over-sized. There is limited space underneath the overhanging flash unit/pentaprism assembly.

Moved to lens discussion area.

Interestingly, Pentax seem to get better quality out of Sony's sensor than Sony can.

Clearly the sensor itself is not the only factor.

The most important thing is to make sure that the dioptre adjustment on the eyepiece is correctly set. And then we can use our eyes to focus. There should not really though be much difference between what the camera indicates as in focus and what we see as in focus.

So, point the camera at a blank surface and adjust the dioptre until the lines etched on the focusing screen are sharp. It's surprising how many photographers do not do this and hence have manual focusing problems.

Incidentally, we make a lot of AF errors these days, but 1970s manual focusing tests in Photo Technique magazine showed that the average human cannot focus easily in the same place twice. The amount of error found was huge, presumably because the eye adapts and gets tired and is thoroughly unreliable.

Cheap monopods do exactly what is expected - they fall apart....at least all those I have tried have.

I never could get much out of a monopod. Fair enough, it stops up and down movement, but forwards, backwards, sideways it wobbles about...

So for occasional use I no longer even think of a monopod, but use a photographic hiking stick instead. The one I have is the Trailwise Photoshoot 7075. There's no ball and socket head as standard, but it would be possible to carry one easily enough. The fitting is a standard tripod screw, concealed beneath the wooden top.

Surely is.