It may have been one of my one page articles in PU Magazine. I see you are a subsciber so you may still have the issue.

It depends on which versions we are talking about. An SMC Pentax-M 100mm f4 Macro for £100 or so off eBay would be a good buy. Macro lenses don't necessarily gain much from being AF.

It depends on what you can find though.

I have a friend who used to be a professional photographer and routinely used to use Tamron 90mm f2.5 Macro lenses. However, they wore out and in the time he only every bought one Pentax, Nikon or Olympus lens (he used all three) he went through four Tamrons. They are not as well built.

With the current prices of second hand lenses, I don't see much of a case for buying anything other than Pentax macro lenses.

Standard advice is that you calculate minimum shutter speeds taking the "35mm equivalent" figure, simply because you are getting the same magnification and therefore shake.

So 300mm = 1/450sec.

However, SR changes the figure again, so in the example given it would be worth trying down to 1/125sec if you had to.

However again, this tackles camera shake but has no effect of subject movement. With wildlife you need as fast a shutter speed as you can get.

There are more howevers, but I think that's enough for the basics.

Organisation of photos starts with transferring the originals in an orderly fashion.

My hard drive structure runs like this:

K20D 088 MB&B Canal 24 06 10
K20D 089 Sally Christening 25 06 2010

and so on. These are the original JPEG images and are never altered. They don't take up much space per image and can happily be stored and archived. They can be found easily.

EPZ 2010-06
EPZ 2010-07

are finished files for ePHOTOzine. Again easily found and taking up even less space as each one is 200K-400K maximum.

Once you are disciplined in filing then the rest is no problem. If you want files in order within a folder, then number them 001, 002, 003 etc. They will stay in order.

As you have a weealth of images stored, why not just leave them there. You don't necessarily have to do anything. If you do something drastic with that Delete command you might regret it later.

It's a nice composition but I find it very soft. I would prefer some more drama and some crisp, sharp focusing that reveals more of the fine detail.

Being able to continue shooting in the rain is wonderfully liberating. The glistening colours can be magnificent.

It depends on your point of view, but if I get a fantastic shot the getting wet bit is irrelevant. It's soon forgotten, but the image is there.

300mm is long enough for a lot of wildlife. Don't forget the 35mm-equivalent is 450mm, so this is no mean magnification.

I'd rather carry a Pentax 55-300mm or 300mm f4 than a Sigma 50-500mm.

Visual literacy can be learned, practised and developed, but a spark of natural talent always helps.

The lens is a late SMC Takumar that lasted a little beyond the advent of the K mount. It was only supplied with the SP1000.