That would truly be even worse. Sometimes it's good to say no....

Fantastic Phil, hope you capture lots of great images.

We'll be keenly waiting for some sample shots as soon as you can get something online. There's Your Photos in the forum and of course the Gallery as well.

The "you've got a good camera, you could take our wedding photos, it'll be good experience for you" means "you have an invite to the wedding but instead of enjoying yourself we'd like you to work all day for free and then spend hours/days afterwards making the images good for us" - happens all the time I'm sure!

Manual could mean two things here. Manual focus may well be a given, but the second thing will be manual controls for exposure. As opposed to say an ME Super with aperture priority auto exposure.

For a fully manual camera that only needs batteries for the meter, I prefer the Pentax MX. In screw thread, the Spotmatic.

I think you can do without the hassle of that Ken.

Check the JPEG settings and use "Natural" to get realistic results. Maybe it's set to "Vivid" or maybe the saturation has been turned up.

Clipping of the reds is common in digital cameras of its day, so if there's no detail in the red areas then they have been over-exposed.

There could be all sort of things, so maybe resetting factory defaults and then reading the manual is the way to go?

It's not metering that I may shoot more than one shot for, but I might if the shutter speed is slow, even when using SR. Usually some shots will be sharper than the rest.

Well, it's a different type of competition and the reward is that the winner gets a prize. It's run from the office and I don't know who judges it. PentaxDan will be able to help you I think.

The weekly and monthly competitions have no prize, but they offer two different types of structure. One for new images shot specially (monthly) and one for any image (weekly) and these are appraised by the judge. It sounds like these are the ones you will want to enter.

Don't forget there's plenty of feedback on ePHOTOzine as well, a great place to see how a wide audience responds to our images.

You can't generalise really, or you can up to a point only. Different manufacturers offer different types of output from their cameras, sometimes even when using basically the same sensors.

As a generalisation, all compact cameras give more gutsy images because they use slightly more aggressive sharpening and colour than DSLRs do. It's expected that compacts should produce images that are "print ready", whereas DSLR owners are expected to want to use software to process images themselves.

You can alter the JPEG parameters of your K30 to give images as gutsy as your Leica. To be fair though, they are different manufacturers and you may still find differences in the final result.

I don't think a test result on another make of camera is very relevant though. For example, I've never been as impressed by Canon JPEG capture as I have with Pentax.

It's interesting that the K-3 seriously out-resolves the Nikon D610 using RAW capture, and equals it using JPEG capture. That suits me very well for what I like to get out of digital cameras. See the latest issue of AP and the previous one to compare the values.

There is a huge point in going beyond 16MP if it gives something useful, which I believe it does. If you want the lowest noise then stick with 16MP. This is the same advice that Pentax were giving when the K10D was introduced. In that case, if you wanted the lowest noise stick with 6MP.