The discussion was held prior to ttk posting his Canon pictures as we were expecting that he might, and the decision from that discussion was that this was a Pentax forum and pictures should be Pentax only.

Not a question of me being lenient or not....

Manfrotto 055 is ideal. Not sure of the price including head but I'll guess at £100 - £125 or so?

I've avoided using tripods for years, but I'm a bit of a late convert to them!

Hand held is fine up to a point, but there is still a difference between sharp and critically sharp, for which you definitely need a tripod. Try shots side by side with and without to satisfy yourself how significant it is.

It must be a sturdy tripod though, not a flimsy plastic one.

Whatever colour space you use, stick to the same one all the way through.

Bear in mind that images for the web will need to be sRGB.

I use sRGB for all my applications, from the camera through to print and web. This gives brighter prints, admittedly with a reduced colour gamut compared to Adobe RGB, but it's never proved to be a problem.

Adobe RGB has a wider colour gamut and may look desaturated on your computer screen. The printer will not be able to reproduce all the colours available.

Competition is now fixed.

Interesting, but we can't take any thread as fact, so as always some caution is needed.

The last time I was at a school Nativity Play, last year, the head teacher asked "Does anyone mind if people want to take photos?" and nobody did, so everyone took photos.

Some people love to be officious, others are a bit more normal.

You've highlighted one of the problems with prints - the machines compensate to give an average exposure, so it's no surprise that your bracketed exposures are very similar. What you need is hand printing, and that is very expensive.

For this reason, if you want to do special effects, be it altering exposure, colour balance or whatever, then the only real film option is to shoot colour slides. What you do is what you get, which teaches a lot about composition and exposure.

Otherwise, setting up your own darkroom will give you the total control, but the learning curve will be very steep.

Long lenses that focus close casn be very useful for pictures of flowers, small animals and birds. You don't have to restrict yourself to distant objects.

The most important thing though is to use a tripod wherever possible. A 300mm lens is a 450mm-equivalent in film terms, and that's a long length to try to hold staedy, even with SR.

The permissable input voltage is marked on the back of your Pentax charger and will say something like 100V - 240V. An adapter is all you need.

It's currently being sorted - a useful time to remind everyone that symbols in the titles can cause problems!