Steady on George, crusty old salt!

Very interesting, thank you for that.

There is no privacy law in the UK though, but other laws may be used when convenient.

I don't agree that anything in digital photography is cheating - to cheat you have to deliberately break rules for your advantage. Not sure that applies at all.

As regards a loss in quality, if there is one I can't spot it with images side by side on screen at 100%.

That lens correction is amazing.

I don't feel very excited about the colour of these shots to be honest. They don't look like the best Kodachrome slides I've seen. I think it's probably because Kodachrome does not scan well so the scanning has not done the images any favours.

Kodachrome is vibrant and virtually grain free and also holds its colour better than any E-6 film can. However, it needs to be kept in a dark, cool, dry environment. It fades quicker under light than any E-6 film does.

There is a Kodachrome setting on my Nikon Coolscan V, but I've never been impressed with the results from those scans either.

How times change...When I set out on the path of learning photography in the 1970s a 24mm was considered ultra-wide and I could only dream of affording a 20mm.....most of us had a 28mm and that was as wide as we could afford to go.

Amin, ultra-wides are certainly needed for architectural interiors and cramped environments, but for ladscapes they can be disappointing unless there is a strong foreground interest.

Moderate telephoto lenses select details and bring distant subjects into view much better. Pictures of mountains with wide angles look distant and small. Telephoto shots give the mountains a better sense of size and imnportance.

I use a 12-24mm, but I don't use it much. It is mainly used inside buildings to capture whole rooms.

Not necessarily. Compact cameras and camera phones may be seen as less threatening than DSLRs.

I'm not suggesting that it is a cultural thing, only that it could be. Beyond the headlines in our newspapers and the scant details we have there may be a lot that we don't know.

Understanding can be difficult sometimes, but isn't the point that people in Kuwait don't like being photographed by those who wave DSLRs at them, so the government has stopped it happening?

It may be that it isn't the case that people who are Kuwaiti nationals are being stopped from doing something, they maybe don't want to do it and don't want it happening.

This is a moot point, but if we believe the Pentax handbooks it is actually format-related.

So, for 35mm film cameras, 200mm lens = at least 1/200 sec

For APS-C DSLR 200mm = 200 x 1.5 = at least 1/300 sec

Therefore, for 6x7cm. 200mm lens (and I haven't got a table handy)is hand holdable in theory at slightly slower speeds than 1/200 sec

This actually fits well with experience of Rolleiflexes (6x6cm) where the standard 80mm lens can be happily hand held at 1/30sec, the same as was advised for standard lenses on any format for many years.

So, the summary is that the hand holdable speed is dependent on magnification, not focal length, but focal length is the useful rule of thumb that tends to hold together well enough.