It's down to cost. Pentax are one of the few manufacturers to almost always provide a hood, but the L lenses are reduced cost without being reduced quality. The hood, metal mount and Quick Shift had to be sacrificed.

You can get a hood from SRS.

Those images were too large, which is why this forum is being distorted in IE8.

A true zoom will retain focus as it is zoomed. This is a parfocal zoom.

A varifocal needs to be refocused after zooming. This type of lens is commonly found and is more accurately called a "variable focal length lens" - it releases the lens designer from some of the tricky design problems.

There is only one DA 300mm lens though - so there must simply be a variation in the fine detail of the description as well as different suppliers have wildly different prices.

The plastic mount seems OK on lenses going back many years, but I know what you mean. You could sell the Sigma on ebay and buy a lenshood for the Pentax. It is a better lens, even in its cut down version.

I would be very surprised if it wasn't, and with high power machines as well.

Number 6 of these has to remain my favourite - fantastic shadow, lighting and exposure and the added bonus of that impressively placed figure.

Projects are always good. Now you have so many images, not just this project, why not gather them together in a Blurb book? I could imagine that people would buy that and enjoy it very much.

What is often not realised is that most zooms are not true zooms these days and they don't hold focus very well when zoomed. I suppose with their complexity something has to give, and holding focus and distortion are the ones usually sacrificed.

I don't use a zoom as you do flossie, only at its extremes, and do find them useful for fine tuning composition, but I always use my legs as well and refocus as a final step. Assuming a static subject of course.

Like all tools, a zoom lens exists to be exploited for a particular purpose or effect.

Quite a few of those extra lenses are quite expensive and specialised, reflecting the fact that Canon has some very specific solutions for professional users.

In terms of lenses that us mere mortals would actually buy, there is probably not that much difference. A few more certainly, but it does become more even.

It's a lot more useful than the new Sony NEX-5, which has apparently discarded apertures in favour of a "background defocusing" setting.

You're right George, and indeed a good photographer can manage with very basic equipment.

However, I do believe that more user-friendly equipment has meant a general increase in quality at all levels. We can see this in our club competitions, where sometimes members with limited photographic knowledge are actually producing very high quality work.

That can tend to get spoilt when they become convinced that they must buy primes, shoot RAW and all the other more advanced notions. It can ruin their enjoyment.

Our Vice-Chair is a case in point. She arrived with no photographic skills, but within a year had developed a very keen eye for composition and was producing excellent images. Then she started thinking, "I'll not photograph this, the judge won't like it." That ruined her photography for a while until she realised what was happening. Now she's very, very good.

So although primes might be classically the "better" thing they too are not the holy grail.