There's a couple of shots to demonstrate selective focusing! Nice colours in the first two, but, as you say, going too far in the third. It makes the background compete for attention, which is rarely a good thing.

It's worth checking which WB setting you like. I don't like the flash setting for flash so I use daylight. AWB also works well with flash, so try them all and see what you think.

I don't know why you think that - I've just had a look and nothing has been deleted.

Sometimes people make posts and forget to click "add comment" - I've certainly done that!

Not much communication this week about "Communications" so don't forget - just a few hours left to enter.

A perceptive answer George.

Your choice of a Bronica was logical in that it works the "same way round" in terms of focus and aperture scales as Pentax and Nikon, unlike say the Mamiya MF cameras.

At the price it's bound to be a small market, relatively speaking, but it has the possibility of earning some good money in it and won't do any harm. Like yourself, I have no maiden aunts to provide funding, but if some cash turned up and it were to be available, I just might go for it.

It is just so desireable....

The S3 is a very old manual film camera with a fixed eyepiece dioptre setting, probably of -1. This means that the effective distance from the eye to the focusing screen is about 1m so if you can't focus your eye that close it will always be blurred.

The solution for this could simply be to use reading glasses when using the camera. Then focus may well be very easy. Just turn the focusing ring until the image is sharp.

Commercial links in your post have been removed.

Black and white photography is where I started. Printing in my own darkroom, colour was way too expensive for me and when I did try it out it was so slow and unsatisfying.

However, the art of making black and white prints kept me happy for decades and, eventually, I became quite good at it. There are people I know who were much better. It's messy, time consuming and a pleasure all of its own to disappear under that red light for a day. Eventually I would emerge into the light, blinking like a mole, with a clutch of prints that still needed washing, drying, spotting....

However, now I do mostly colour because that's the way we see the wrold and it's no difference in digital photography. I make black and white or colour images as I think the subject demands. Black and white is the stuff of dark drama, shapes, tones and textures...for me at least.

Colour is the world of reality or fantasy as our imaginations dictate and can be brash or ethereal, or any other mixture.

There is a certain charm though to toning prints with real chemicals, or even food dyes, or doing the special effects in the camera or darkroom instead of Photoshop. If you feel inclined to have a go at traditional techniques, then go for it, but it's not something you can just excel at without a lot of experimentation and practice.

Possibly possible but probably not. I don't think the Japanese work quite that much in unison. Then there's the rest of the world.

I suspect Pentax will be looking for more factory space soon.

My first question would be do you really need a polariser with such a wide lens?

The first problem is vignetting - dark corners where the lens is so wide the filter cuts off the edges.

The second is that polarisation varies across the sky, so with very wide lenses polarisers cause banding effects.

The third thought is that with such wide lenses the sky light is arriving at the lens quite obliquely. This makes the corners darken naturally and, coupled with the lens's own vignetting we get a nice effect without polarisation.

If you really want a polariser then an immense and expensibe screw in design is really what you would need. Look at Hoya, B+W, Heliopan, etc.

Sorry about the custom setting - looks like it's back to checking the manual!