Well done!

Picture editors will be after great pictures, they won't care what they were shot on. Unless of course they are sent to Pentax User, or Olympus User, or Nikon User.....then it will be relevant.

I think there are Pentax cameras to be seen Peter - and you are carrying them, flying the flag!

There are also more Pentax cameras in the Philippines than most places in the world. They are assembled there!

Have a great trip and show us some pictures when you get back?

If you format the card in the camera, rather than deleting images, there will definitely be no problems. I wouldn't try to discourage people from doing this MrS, because it is good practice and it works. Good practice costs no time and does no harm. Belt and braces.

I know we can get away with doing less, but sometimes cards bite back as a consequence. They also get cluttered with file fragments and the capacity very gradually drops.

I'd check the image styles and digital filters to make sure one wasn't inadvertently set.

If the camera is set to lock the meter reading when the shutter is pressed then I can see how we could get under or over exposure if the lighting changed. Or, for example, if we were panning from a dark area to a light one.

Could the problem be something along these lines?

I've just checked the spec sheet and it is indeed 6/3 fps on the K50, and therefore it will be on the K500 as well.

Things change Mike. I think the current K500 and K50 were 6fps/3fps, it will be in the spec sheet.

When we're away on holiday with the family, we all have a little game when we get back to the cottage, "How many shots did you take today?" I don't usually "win" that contest!

A 14mm is a specialised lens though Nigel. A 55-300mm isn't. If we want pictures of birds or sporting events, we'll need the reach.

Looking at your lens list, would it be fair to say you're more of a wide angle to standard lens photographer?

At best, DOF scales on lenses are notoriously inaccurate. They are good enough for a rough and ready evaluation of the hyperfocal distance, but I would always stop down one stop further than they suggest for the optimum result.

Now stop down mechanisms I find unusable as the ground glass screens are too small to evaluate DOF. But we can see the sharpest point well enough with extreme care. I say that because test have always shown that the eye can be dreadful at judging the sharpest point. The variation in focusing point when manually focusing is surprisingly large.