Fantastic, love cats, kittens even better, you can't go wrong!

The f1.4 has a different character to the f1.7. It is more contrasty and may well appear sharper, but may not have the same degree of resolution.

Overall though both lenses are as good as you could wish to get.

I clean lenses when necessary, not too often hopefully, by using the Pentax microfibre cloth.

Flick off any specks, breath on glass, allow to evaporate and then wipe with cloth.

It's worked well for me for a very long time with no signs of damage to the front elements of my lenses.

The third shot has lots of potential, but I think needed some more work. When taking shots like these selection/composition are just as important as any other image, but I feel here the overall "wow" of the view has meant some details have crept in that would be best avoided.

The van should, IMHO, definitely go. It isn't in keeping with the overall image. The reflection is not interesting - it could perhaps reflect some more recognisable part of the lighting on the building. There also appears to be a general slope on the image, towards the right.

Finally, I find a clash betweeen the sharp pool reflection and the unsharp foreground and I might have been tempted to ditch the foreground.

Hope you don't find this too picky, but I think you can progress this image into something much, much better.

Apochromatic: a lens that focuses all three colours of light to the same point.

Achromatic: focuses blue and green light properly, red less so.

This is especially important to prevent chromatic abberation in telephoto lenses.

This is quite ironic, in that having sold that lens we then found a need for it and have bought another one....

The FAJ 75-300mm is actually a very respectable lens, and very useful for macro shots of small animals and flowers at very large working distances.

The DA 50-200mm is also excellent and much smaller. We have one of those each as well.

Nor me. However, I would prefer a lens that had not been serviced. The reasoning for this is that there is a lot of poor servicing, even DIY servicing, that goes on and I'd prefer an untouched lens in that respect.

Truly mint examples are worth more. There are plenty of tatty lenses going for low prices, but where's the joy in owning a piece of junk?

Somethimes amazing baragains crop up, especially when superb lenses are found on low prices camera bodies. I picked up a superb SMC Pentax-A 28-135mm f4 for around £20. It came with a free ME Super.....

Just to be clear we are talking about the position of the AF-S, AF-C, M lever on the camera and not setting the mode dial to M for manual exposure?

When manual focusing lenses are fitted to the K10D and the camera is set to AF then it will only fire if the lens is in focus, as indicated by the green symbol in the viewfinder. This can cause the impression that the camera is not firing, but in reality the point of focus may just be slightly off.

Probably the focusing selector has been shifted to AF. If you set it to M all should be well.