Books like "The Asahi Pentax Way" always contained lots of depth of field tables for various lenses. These might be helpful and the books can be found quite readily from second hand booksellers, including eBay, Abebooks and Amazon.

It reinforces in our minds how critical macro focusing is. Tripod and manual focus still remains the best option I think.

Please only post in one section, the other thread has been closed to avoid confusion.

Flash bulbs are quite different to electronic flash - they burn for longer and need different synchronisation.

I would save the flash bulbs for older cameras that have M synchronisation. FP flash bulbs can be used with some Pentax cameras that have FP sockets, such as the MX, at shutter speeds up to 1/1000sec. These are very long burning so keep going all through the shutter travel.

This was Pentax's first digital camera. It was also marketed as Hewlett-Packard and presumably was a joint venture with them.

This has lasted for 733 pages so far, so no need to spoil it now is there?

At the top of the page select Gellery>Competitions and there you will find all the weekly competitions.

No need to link to a web image, just upload your image directly.

It is so much simpler than linking into forums. To help images load more quickly though I usually upload 1000 pixel images, just like I use for ePHOTOzine.

Excellent, next time I'm on my way to Skye I'll drop by. Here's the advice to pay for it!

A fast modern computer should run Photoshop just fine. I'm using a fairly basic machine with Windows 7 and 3GB of RAM. Photoshop 5 runs smoothly and without problems. I have a 1TB hard drive, plus 500GB and 350GB additional drives to back up to and/or use as scratch disks.

I do use the 64 bit version of CS5 and I find it works quicker than CS2.

I think you could buy something "off the shelf" from any computer supplier that would do just fine. A separate video card, rather than one integral to the mother board, would be a better option. That should be simple enough, just check the spec of the machine you buy.

Bill has a point about modern lenses being incredibly complex compared with manual focus ones. This applies to all marques of course, but I don't expect the lenses to survive as AF ones in quite the same way as lenses of 40 years ago have.

However, even after motors have worn out they may still manually focus well enough and hopefully wearing them out will take many years.

The K mount was a masterpiece from its inception. It has proved possible to adapt it as electronics and then AF have entered the scene and keep an astonishing amount of backwards-compatibility.

I would think of it as an asset, not a drawback.