Following an idea from petekd (thank you Pete) here is a thread for a new weekly competition.

Please post your entries in this thread. The subject this week is "The Number Six" and the deadline is Midnight on Saturday 7th July.

On Sunday 8th July I will judge the images, post comments and declare a Winner plus second and third places. The Winner will choose and judge the following week's competition....

No prizes, but think of the challenge and the kudos! A bit of fun for all.

Please try to post images not exceeding 1000 pixels wide, to avoid the thread scrolling from side to side.

Many thanks and have fun!

And here we are in the Optio section!

Hope you get it sorted OK.

That's the way to look at it. Once I've bought something I stop thinking about the price and get on with using it.

I've known people make themselves miserable by not letting it go.

Mixing systems is crazy, it causes confusion, duplication of kit, won't work....

Really, cut your losses and sell one or the other, and it will do you an enormous favour if you believe the comments that have been made already!

I guess because it's adaptive. It might have a simple one element lens, but the shape of that lens can be altered by muscular contracrion, the image shimmers over many pixels and is never still, so the interpolated resolution is immense and the software that controls the final perceived image is second to none. It sees what it wants to see and filters out the unwanted.

It even corrects the inverted image so things look the right way up. Experiments with mirror systems that inverted the image to the eye showed that after a few hours/days the system would correct things to show the right orientation.

Very clever stuff.

If you don't make prints larger than A4 why not just invest in extra lenses?

The K10D makes better A3 prints without a doubt and also makes cropping more feasible.

The 16-45mm is a better lens than the 18-55mm, but stopped down the latter performs very well indeed anyway. Only upgrade if you need the wider coverage of the 16-45mm or if you need very large prints of the highest quality.

Your DL2 with its 18-55mm is a very sound combination. Why not add a 50-200mm to it?

Perspective is only affected by shooting distance, not by the lens in use.

It only appears that lenses affect perspective when you, for example, go close in with a wide angle lens to fill the frame with a subject. To fill the frame with the same subject and a telephoto you would obviously be much further away, hence the apparent perspective change is due not to the lens but the distance.

Try it and see. Photograph something with a telephoto and without moving take a second picture with a wide angle. Now blow up the centre of the wide angle shot to show the same image as the telephoto. The perspectiuve will be identical.

The macro setting on many zoom lenses is misleading as few focus closer than 1:4 magnification ( a quarter life size). Macro means 1:1 or life size images. This can be achieved with one of the Pentax macro lenses, either the 50mm or the 100mm.

The 18-55mm kit lens does focus very close however, and is a very useful general purpose lens.

The SMC Takumar 55mm f1.8 lens would be ideal for use on bellows. The 50mm f1.4 does not have a flat enough field at close distances.

Your cheapest option if you want to have a go is to buy the screw mount lens and the Adapter K for the camera body.

Yes, the R72 only lets IR light through, as that is beyond red in the spectrum there's no transmission at all of blue and green light. Logically we would then assume that the meter would read only IR light, but it's not designed for that and there may well be filters in place over the sensor. there's also the CCD filter to consider, so the sensitivity of the CCD may not be what we expect.

Real IR enthusiasts will have the IR blocking filter in the camera removed and replaced with clear glass. Then you have a dedicated IR camera. In the USA I notice that there is an IR version of the Fuji S5 pro marketed.

Us pentax Users would have to have a camera modified by a repair house. Has anyone actually had that done?