Sounds fair enough...I'm looking to make an image for a competition called "Cold" - it actually being cold is fine, but the first effort doesn't look cold, so it needs working on. I'll try again and post the result soon!

For exteme photography you need an extreme Pentax - I'll be looking for a WG3 sometime, not until I've managed to go one step too far with the W90 though.

It's not so much accessories but the operating logic and colour quality that are compatible.

Pentax cameras have the colour that I like. The menus of all the cameras, and the other controls, work in the same way.

I've tried many, but still go back to Pentax in the end.

Can't get enough of that Natural Goodness!

Last time it was the dishwasher, today I thought I'd see how the W90 got on in the freezer. I didn't leave it for too long, as -18C is a bit outside its parameters, but long enough to do an interval-timer set of 10 shots.

The battery registered empty when I reclaimed the camera, but soon recovered when warmed up again. It took the pictures fine, the only problem is it doesn't look particularly cold. Thinking cap back on....

The way to have more control is to use Av and define your desired aperture from the start.

There are only three variables.

Given a fixed ISO, if you widen the aperture the shutter speed becomes faster. If you close down the aperture the shutter speed becomes slower. There's no advantage to using Tv instead, unless for some reason the shutter speed needs to be the fixed value. Even for sport you can use Av, because it doesn't really matter whether the camera delivers 1/350s or 1/360s...as long as it's fast enough. If it isn't, open the aperture. If you don't want to, then increase the ISO.

But whichever mode you do use, you can use it for virtually everything after that. I only change to M when using studion flash, otherwise everything else is shot in Av.

It's an area where theory and reality diverge, basically because there is no such thing as a "perfect" lens.

In theory, a 50mm f/1.2 lens will perform best at f/1.2 and diffraction will take the edge off that progressively as we stop down.

In practice, the "rule of thumb" is that performance peaks at two stops down. For an f/2 lens this would be f/4, but this may or may not be true. Generally, expensive lenses are better built and peak closer to the theory. Cheaper lenses may not reach peak performance till f/11. Really poor lenses will just keep getting better as you stop down.

As I have a collection of good Pentax lenses, I worry more about the effects of depth of field than resolution when I'm selecting which aperture to use.

I think you can adjust any lens, although there's no guarantee that the third party lenses will report their identity correctly.

No doubt somebody has done it and can tell us definitively.

The positive point is that this professional feature is available even on lower priced Pentax cameras. It's needed mostly for third party lenses I would imagine. I haven't found a Pentax lens yet that needed adjustment. No doubt I will one day.

I don't see anything negative about something being available though.

The camera designer always has a problem in that they can't satisfy everyone in one model. Hence lots of different options on the market.

There are those who desperately want an optical finder on these camera types and those like myself who don't. Nobody is right or wrong.

I don't because a decent finder of this sort makes a camera much bigger and more expensive and frankly I don't like the parallax error. That's why I prefer DSLRs. However, on a compact, compromises have to be made and I'm happy enough these days using the back screen.

Users new to photography don't expect a viewfinder, they expect a screen anyway, so apart from limited models the future path may well be clear.

Not everybody wants an optical viewfinder of the rangefinder-style type. On a DSLR that's something else, but I wouldn't want to go back to 1970s style direct vision finders.