I know that Scott and you know very well what the situation is. It doesn't need any explanation from me.

So I see Scott. Instead of flooding the forum I'd suggest you refer to your e-mail inbox instead.

Good points all. Looks like it might be a difficult one to make run.

Personal mentoring in the field works well, but on a forum it might be difficult to do something meaningful.

I suppose every helpful answer someone gives here is mentoring in a way.

Converters will do nothing for quality. I've not found a good one yet, although I am currently looking at an old Pentax one. Even this doesn't excite me so far!

A 135mm lens on a APS-C sized sensor will give the same size of image as a 200mm lens on 35mm film.

Actually 202.5mm, but let's not be too pedantic!

Why not try it anyway just to see what it's like?

A typical Premium JPEG is around 10MB, in itself quite a large file. There's not much compression there, but all the immediate advantages of faster workflow and better general compatibility.

It's been suggested to me that it would be good to have some mentoring for the benefit of less experienced photographers.

I'm not quite sure how this would work, but the basic idea would be that someone would ask for guidance with a particular problem and then someone would volunteer to help and advise them.

For example, recently Sue and I have done field trips to help on a couple of subjects with a few friends. How we could translate that into a forum context is up for discussion.

The basic notion is a good one I think, so who would like help with something in particular? And after that, who would like to help them?

I suppose one way it might work is, for example, I would say I needed help with say studio portraits. Someone would volunteer to look at my pictures via e-mail and offer advice. Then I would send some more pictures when I had tried the advice, for further comment.

Over to you guys for some opinions and suggestions.

The studio will make life a lot easier, that's for sure.

The 18-55mm and 55-300mm will complement each other nicely. You could consider a fast 50mm f1.4 for low light situations and portraits, but it's not essential.