The ES II is a lovely camera, but unfortunately is not particularly reliable. It was an early electronic SLR and seems to have been released before many electronic issues had been solved.

Nonetheless, if I found one at a low price I would buy it!

This is not the first time I have heard of or experienced this sort of thing, which may be an innocent mistake but leaves one with suspicions....For some reason quite a few of the incidents I have come across have all had the *istD as a common feature!

It will if you balance the exposures carefully. If you let the main exposure be a silhouette, the MGB will be hardly lit. Then the flash exposure can light the car - don't forget that to fully expose the car you might need a little more flash than you would inside, because there will be no reflected light from walls and ceiling. Some experimentation should get the effect you seek.

The Super takumar lenses are 42mm screw thread fitting and intended for use on the screw thread Pentaxes such as the Spotmatic. You can use these lenses on your MZ-M if you obtain the lens adapter K. This effectivelt turns the bayonet camera into a screw thread one whilst the sdapter is in place.

However, it would probably be more convenient to obtain a bayonet lens and any Pentax bayonet lens, manual or autofocus, will be suitable. The ranges are labelled SMC Pentax, SMC Pentax-M, SMC Pentax-A, SMC Pentax-F, SMC Pentax-FA as the mount develops.

As this is a manual focusing camera, I would be inclined to stick with the first three of these types, which are manual focus lenses.

I'd love to have a solution for you, but it does sound rather problematic and probably in need of a skilled repair house. If that is the case, I would be looking for another 50mm lens as they are readily available at very low prices. (Even though digital SLR users are beginning to discover that they make very fine 75mm portrait lenses!)

Sorry I can't sound more hopeful this time....

If the display is lighting up OK then we can assume the batteries are OK and the right way round, if not then that is something to check. I have on one occasion found new batteries to be flat.

Try putting the camer on its 100X setting, which is independent of the need for battery power and see if it operates then.

Otherwise, has a film inside reached the end? Try pressing the rewind button on the base to see if the wind on can be completed.

That's all I can think of, after which it will be a repair job. The cost of used ME and ME Super cameras can be very low and might be more economical to consider than a repair.

I think, as said before, that it is because there is so much depth of field that the focusing method is not reliable. You may have to estimate distances, but that will not cause much of a problem for the same reas0n - masses of depth of field.

I do, but I haven't got time just now to put them together properly.

But to take the last point about different frame sizes (and I assume you are thinking of Digital SLRs in this context) then the same applies as would do different film formats. I have chosen widely separated formats in my answer above just to make the difference clearer. If we go to an absolute extreme, then a Minox standard lens for 8x11mm negatives is a 15mm, which has tremendous depth of field and requires no focusing, pretty much as you would expect from the SMC Pentax 15mm f3.5....But in the Minox case the angle of view is a standard lens and in the Pentax case it is an Ultra-Wide. But it is still a 15mm lens in both cases.

I will have a look at my Powerpoints and see if there is a sequence I can send you, perhaps on CD or perhaps by e-mail depending on the file size. Sorry I can't look into it for a day or two, but I will look.

Whatever have we started? This is very complex if it is to be absolutely correct, but say for instance you have a 28mm lens and fill the frame with a subject. Then take a 100mm lens and fill the frame with the subject. In both cases, as the image size on the film (i.e., the magnification ratio) are the same, the depth of field will be exactly the same for a given aperture. However, the perspecrtive will be different because you will be very close with the 28mm and further away with the 100mm.

Now it is well known that there is less apparent depth of field with large format cameras than with say 35mm ones. This is because a large format standard lens might be, say, a 210mm and a 35mm one will be around 50mm. 210mm lenses have less inherent depth of field than 50mm ones.

You can find out about these matters in detail in books on photographic optics, and in less deatail in the better brochures such as the Pentax publication "The Eyes" (probably long out of print) and similar ones from Canon and others.

Otherwise, you can prove it with test shots, which I have done for some of my summer talks at ADAPS.

It doesn't in one sense, but it does if you consider what happens to the end effect. For example, as a consequence of format size the standard lens of a 110 camera is 24mm, and has the depth of field of a 24mm lens. The standard of a 35mm camera is 50mm for a similar angle of view and has the DOF of a 50mm lens, which is less than a 24mm.

On the digital, the 50mm lens appears to have the angle of view of say a 75mm, but it still has the DOF of a 50mm, just like any other 50mm lens....Converslely, a 50mm on a Pentax 67 would definitely be a wide angle, but with inherently less DOF that we would be used to on a 28mm on 135.

This is complicated by bringing in the concept of magnification ratio, which is what DOF really relates to, but the general principle above is what seems to happen in a practical sense.