It's removaeable so that you can rotate a polarising filter with the lens hood still in place.

The pentax K10D produces excellent JPEGs which are not over-sharpened in camera. This is not the same as not being sharp. All DSLRs by nature start with a fairly soft-looking image but how much in-camera processing takes place modifies this.

It is far better to do the sharpening in Photoshop, using Unsharp Mask as the final step in the preparation of the image for print.

There will be some photographers who want a print-ready image straight from the camera, although they will be missing much of the potential of digital by doing this. However, the sharpening in-camera can be increased to taste.

It's not a problem at all.

I like succinct answers!

First of all I copy all the JPEGs on the memory card onto my hard drive, using a card reader. These are left just as they are as my "negatives" so to speak and the copying over does not degrade or change them.

However, the JPEG process involves a compression that loses some information, so once I open a file and work on it I never save that modified version as a JPEG but always as a TIFF.

The other "lossless" format that you might use when a picture is "in progress" but not finished is the Photoshop format PSD. This enables all your work to be saved complete with layers and so on so that you can just continue where you left off. In practice, I never use this as I never take that long to process a picture.

In summary, save for print or submission as a TIFF. The only time you need to save as a JPEG is when preparing pictures for web use, when they have to be JPEGs.

I like your composition, but I'd crop out the sun completely, leaving IMHO a fantastic letter box format picture.

The colour is very unusual, but I quite like it!

As for sharpening, that is best left for photoshop, where it should be the very last thing that you do before saving your image, usually as a TIFF. (Never save a JPEG as a JPEG). So I leave my camera sharpening at the central default setting.

Hope that helps a little.

As I understand it it tries to compensate for movement and if there is no movement (as on a tripod) it gets into a loop as it tries to find some. How it works is another matter - i can think of a few ways it could work but I don't actually know.

So what would the SR system make of a panned image? My feeling is that it should be switched off as it cannot possibly reduce shake when there is so much "shake" being deliberately made. For the opposite reason it is switched off when using a tripod - otherwise it starts trying to compensate for shake that doesn't exist.

Still, both situations could have creative potential.

Have you also considered the SMC Pentax-DA 50-200mm, which is an ultra-compact and superb lens?

A ring flash gives very flat, even lighting, so an extra flash to one side is commonly used to add a bit of modelling.

Many thanks for all the replies so far. Flash is not my forte and all advice is gratefully received!