It seems that there are supply-chain problems in Australia. Is this partly because of the huge distances involved, or just peculiar to Pentax?

Here is the UK though patience is needed too. I waited probably 4-5 months for my Pentax 12-24mm lens. By that time it arrived I'd almost forgotten why I wanted it, but on the other hand I don't have to pay for it for another 6 months or so yet...

Nice idea, George, yes, go for Samsung as your backup!

Do stick with Pentax, the cameras handle much better and the ergonomics of the design is superb. Nikon viewfinders seem feeble to me by comparison, and Canon have always seemed spec-heavy but poorly made. IMHO Canon will ditch their followers at a stroke if some other technology suddenly offers a lower cost manufacturing route. They have changed mounts before...

When I use studio flash with the *istDS I set the shutter speed manually to 1/180sec and set the aperture manually after checking it out with a flash meter. This means that zoom lenses should ideally have constant aperture value as you zoom.

The pop up flash is always set to manual use, and in fact I never use it.

I use a Manfrotto 055 Classic which is very stable and solid.

I wouldn't mess about in the field with these settings - they are intended to be set to the user's preference and by and large left there. So I leave all the colour, saturation, contrast, etc, at the middle settings and make all adjustments in Photoshop, where there is far more computer power than a camera can possibly have.

For my sins I don't use RAW capture. Highest quality JPEG gives me very nice A3 prints and the convenience of being able to get straight on with dealing with an image. I think many photographers negate the potential advantages of RAW by batch processing to TIFFs without considering each individual image, or even by later saving as JPEGs.

The golden rule is nerver, ever save any image that has been worked on as a JPEG. This will introduce some degredation of the image. Always use a non-lossy save such as PSD or TIFF, usually TIFF for a finalised image.

Well, you didn't quite give it away.....but it certainly found a Good Home....

There are plenty of times I ditch AF altogether and use manual focus. Sometimes for portraits and almost always for macro.

Centre-spot focusing always. I tried letting the camera decide for about 5 seconds before making the switch! It can't know what I'm wanting to focus on, so I decide by focusing, locking the point with a slight depress of the shutter release and then re-composing as desired before taking the picture.

The 50mm lenses do have different characters, and I see them as follows:

f1.2 Very expensive and very high quality, equal to the best at small apertures, and having very good handling of point light sources (ideal for night shooting)

f1.4 Very high contrast at the expense of fine resolution. Ideal reportage lens.

f1.7 The best overall performance that can be abused with close up attachments, lens reversing, etc.

f2 Needs stopping down for best results, but very fine performance at f8 and smaller. A low cost version usually sold with the lower cost bodies.

Compared with the screw thread lenses, you will find that the bayonet ones reach maximum performance much quicker, maybe at f5.6-f8 as opposed to f8-f11. The character of the images is different, but they are superb examples of the lens-makers' art.

In Photoshop 7, go to the top right and click and drag the File browser into the main space. Drag the edges to enlarge it and you can then see thumbnails of whichever folder you are in. Delest the folder you want in the usual Windows way from within this Browser. When you highlight a picture the EXIF information will be bottom left. Sorry, I assumed quite a bit in my first answer!

When you have finished with the Browser, you can close it to avoid taking too much RAM from PS7, but when you want it again go to the top menus and select View>File Browser and it will pop up again where you left it.

I think this is the best way to find picture files in PS7, much better than using File>Open.

Hope that helps!