You're right - there were a lot. I reduced the shutter speed a lot from initial 8 seconds to closer to 1 second - I was just getting a load of blown highlights with the longer exposure....

Here's a link to a slideshow of photos I took last night. It's the view from Ruskin Park, near our house in South London, looking towards the London Eye which is about 3 miles away.

Not posting the shots in this forum as they didn't come from a Pentax (my son was using that at the same time.....), but it shows you what the GF1 can do....

link

Happy new year!

Jon

Hello - welcome and enjoy your new hobby! My advice would be to stick with what you've got until you've worked out whether you need anything else! It's a lot simpler and cheaper that way...

But if wildlife is your thing, then you may find that the 50-200 lens is not always long enough - especially for birds - in which case the most obvious affordable upgrade is the Pentax 55-300 zoom lens (you could trade your 50-200 in because you wouldn't really need both). The 55-300 is excellent, but the 50-200 has the advantage of being rather more compact.

I would not buy any kind of teleconverter to put on your 50-200 lens - it is unlikely that the image quality would be any better (and may be worse) than you would get by simply cropping an image taken without the teleconverter on your computer. This comment does not apply to the highest quality converters, but they cost more than your lenses!

You asked about fisheye lenses. These are extremely wide angle, and produce very distorted shots - sometimes almost circular. They are an acquired taste that I personally have not acquired, and would be of limited use in wildlife photography.

If wildlife is your thing, I would ignore suggestions to buy filters - especially ND grads and the like - those are much more useful for landscape photography, but a polariser might help if you often take wildlife photographs near water.

If you like flaura and fauna, including close ups of small creatures and bugs, you might want to consider a macro lens which allows you to focus very closely on small things. Good macro lenses do not run cheap, but this is one area where it would be possible to put a cheap attachment on the lenses you already have, and get some reasonable results.

The cheapest macro option would be to purchase a close up filter to screw into the front of your lens (either of your lenses would be OK for this). In effect this is like screwing a magnifying glass on the front - and means that you can get some pretty decent close up shots. It should be possible to get a decent close up filter (I have used Marumi ones very happily) for around £20. If this appeals to you, I would also strongly recommend you also consider a tripod - it is very hard to take handheld macro shots and get decent results. In fact, personally I would recommend that you buy a tripod to supplement your kit before you buy anything else - having a sturdy support will make by far the biggest difference to your results.

I hope this helps,

Jon

I do use a local back up hard disk drive but also back up any photographs that I don't want to lose to an online account.

In my case I use SmugMug, with which I am very happy. Normal accounts which cost little allow uploads of up to 12MB per file, and if you pay extra for a Pro account then the sky is the limit (or rather, your patience with broadband speeds is the limit....).

It is possible to upload and store RAW files too, and as they store copies on three separate servers shared with Amazon in the USA, I feel more confident about future use of the files than if I had them stored separately at home.

The biggest issue is upload times - realistically you don't want to upload more than 10-12 images at a time if you have a reasonable broadband connection: that can take perhaps 30-45 minutes depending upon their size. But I don't tend to process more than that number of images at any one time anyway (on account of death threats from head office if I spend more time on the computer!), so in reality it hasn't been a problem.

Jon

No - although I have used Marumi, and been very happy with them. Bought from Cameraworld.

isdky - you have a pm

My daughter (14) is very pleased with hers (black) which arrived yesterday. She's also enjoying fiddling on the computer (with the ArcSoft software to start off with) and seems to have started with a black and white self-portrait period..... For the kind of prices you can find them now, they're a great deal.

Whelmed - my pref would be to exchange for your PKM adapter and then agree an extra supplement - I'd say about £45 if your adapter is in good condition. Let me know how that sounds. Cheers,

Jon

If Mike doesn't track one down, let me know..... Have one I could sell.

Best wishes,

Jon

At low ISO the K10D may well be the better performer when compared to the K20D and K-7 - it's certainly at least their equal. Sounds like you made a great decision, and it's old enough that you wouldn't feel too guilty if you upgrade at some time in the not too distant future! Enjoy it,

Jon