Digital is the key. Try running digital intro nights for beginners - you will get new members. Make sure you have a website that is kept up to date and include a forum to make it alive. Then your members can talk between meetings. This brings more activity. Arrange photographic outings. All these sort of things have turned ADAPS from 20 to 90 members in just a few years.

Hope that helps!

Most of my wedding pictures are with the 16-45mm. Photographers used to do very well with a fixed 80mm lens on a Twin Lens Reflex, so even today a battery of lenses is not essential.

It doesn't surprise me at all, especially as many zooms are not true zooms. That is, they don't hold the focus point well as you zoom. They are really varifocal lenses.

It's probably not a fault, just the way things are. Cheap zooms will be worse tham expensive ones.

As serial numbers were mixed up between lenses of different focal length and never were continuous anyway, it seems the age is very well concealed. Even the total numbers made remain a mystery in most cases.

At ADAPS we have 90 or so members of all ages from 16 to 80-odd, and they are increasingly active in photography. The mix is probably 40% female these days.

All the stereotypes have been thrown away in the digital revolution, so for example our female members hire models and studios just as much as the male ones.

We have weekly meetings, but I also run Saturday morning workshops every couple of weeks purely for the beginners, to help them get up to speed.

Asa regards the Internet, we have people who only communicate via our website, but we ghave chat and even competitions there that they can join in for free. Very similar to our competition here, but on a two or three week cycle.

Camera clubs can be what you suggest thoramay, but, depending on who runs them, they don't have to be!

Don't forget that when the 1-3% of cards that fail happens to be that 8MB card, that for you it will be a 100% failure rate...

The point is that the stop down of older lenses operates in a non-linear fashion, wheras the A lenses and after operate in a linear fashion electronically. If the original actuator is missing then the lens is stopped down by some other means that is non-compatible, hence the exposure drifts steadily further afield as you stop down.

This may not be exactly right, but I believe from what I've read that something like this may be happening.

Just be glad we don't use Olympus, where the use of OM lenses on current models is restricted to specific lenses and a few apertures.

It was the amount of physical movement of the actuator arm when the aperture was changed. I did read that prior to the A series it was an uneven movement (non linear) and from the A lenses onwards became linear.

It could make sense.

Very interesting, many thanks for the link.

I was finishing off an article today for PU and one snippet that the research threw up was a bit about the first cameras with a "crippled" K mount such as we use today.

What I'd forgotten was that the exposure errors and difficulties with non-A lenses were always there, even with the film cameras. It was always a problem with the MZ30, 50, 60 cameras. It must be intrinsic in the way the meter coupling works on the earlier lenses. This is the linear/non-linear movement problem.

Clearly nothing can be done about it. It was probably not a problem for us in those days as many of us would have bought the MZ cameras with KAF or KAF2 mounts, both of which were compatible with K and M lenses.