It is normal for NiMH batteries to lose their charge over a period of maybe just a week or two.

Eventually, they also lose their ability to recharge at all. I've seen fugures from 500 to 1000 quoted as their maximum charge cycles before they need replacing.

We had a good time at Arley Hall photographing flowers on Sunday. The bright overcast conditions were ideal. Here's an example:


Pentax K10D with SMC Pentax-DA 50-200mm

Olympus did quite a job in the 1970s with their very ordinary OM series of SLRs. It didn't take long for most professionals to gravitate back to Nikon and Canon though.

Pentax too had a very prominent professional share at one time. They made all sorts of highly specialised gear such as the Quartz lenses corrected for UV photography, the Pentax Nocta for surveillance work, but all these things seem to belong to the Spotmatic era.

I think the arrival of autofocus hit Pentax quite hard. I know the cameras have their fans, but personally I feel the design lost its way and became too bulky. There was none of the slick ergonomics that Pentax had all the way up to the Super A series.

I feel they only found their feet again with the MZ series of cameras and this has improved until now Pentax are back on solid ground again.

I don't think we're all out to get you, so it must be just normal paranoia...

Not dangerous at all, it was an interesting and valid point to raise.

I understand the point you are trying to make, but I just wonder whether the example is not helpful to the argument.

If someone were to copy a painting (and people do for all sorts of reasons) it might be a snap of the Mona Lisa, just to show we were there, which would technically be of no merit perhaps but is just a momento and has value as that. It might be a technically perfect reproduction for one of those fantastic Taschen books and I think that would have merit, purely as a photographic job well done.

In neither case would the photographer be claiming artistic merit.

A picture os a statue might fall into the same categories, but then again in that case an interesting choice of lens, some unusual and dramatic lighting, some Photoshop to add flesh tones to the face and we might be starting to make a new work of art with the original as just a starting point.

So I'm not so sure that I'd be quite so positive as you are suggesting the sutuation is, and maybe I would suggest that each and every instance should be taken on its own merits.

Perhaps you have some examples in mind that we could look at?

Well that sums it up nicely!

What we are probably talking about here is the recording of an exact record of a piece of artwork, maybe for a book on Art or an article for a magazine. In this context the image must be absolutely perfect to be a job well done. A product shot would be an example where this is taken one step further to show the object creatively.

It's a big subject for a hurried question - what exactly is the context?

The lenses will all be useable, but you won't be able to take advantage of the built in ultrasonic motors. These lenses will revert to normal autofocus on the *istD series cameras.

There are quite a few DSLR models that will do very nicely, but my preference would be for the *istDS because of its proper glass pentaprism finder.

The original *istD is highly regarded as well, but I guess its processing speed may well seem a little slow by current standards.