You could try cleaning the contacts with a soft dry cloth, on camera mount and lens mount. The make sure the lens seats properly and is locked in to place.

The F-- is telling to that the camera is not reading the lens. Is any aperture ring on the lens firmly clicked into the "A" position?

Sometimes cameras exceed the expected specification, but it's unpredictable when they do by how much they will.

I've had a look and there are certainly lots of nice comments in the competition itself, so maybe I thought it had all been said. I don't comment of every competition because I don't want to reiterate by rote the same phrases. It's nice to give someone else the chance to comment.

Since you've asked though, I thought it was an excellent competition and the turnout was fine in the end. Despite people being a bit shy at first. There were plenty of great shots, the winner was a worthy one and the judging was thoughtful and complete.

The prizes were duly awarded!

I wasn't aware nothing was said, and the prizes were certainly sorted out. I'll have a look and see what happened.

The minmum focus distance is measured from the sensor plane, which will be further away than the front element of the lens. At the very closest distance it's always difficult to make sure we are not too close when using AF, with any camera.

Sadly no merging facility, but I can stop this one seeing you've provided the link to the other one.

Photobucket?

Two more removed. Please remember that images should be shot within the competition month. These two were September 2012 and April 2012, so please check before posting.

As long as we use "Save As" and a new file name, our original is safe and untouched, regardless of what processing we have done.

In terms od destructive or not, the way it is usually used is in relation to how an image is processed.

For example, if we just take a file in Photoshop and apply various effects one after the other, then this is a destructive process where we are processing at every stage something already processed. So, we may go Levels>Resize>Sharpen>Save as and this is a destructive process. It doesn't matter for just a few steps likie this and is simple and quick. I do it all the time.

If we want a non-destructive process though, we use layers. We apply any effects to a layer and although we have a preview, nothing is done with the original information until we save, then it's all applied at once. It's non-destructive because we can "make" changes without changing the original, until we have everything ready to save. This is the way to go if many effects are being applied, adjusted, removed, etc. Before saving I would flatten an image made in this way, some might opt to save as a Photoshop file and keep the layers so further adjustments can be made at any time.