I have an LX3. For a take everywhere camera, it's nigh on perfect with its fast wide angle and RAW shooting.

Noise performance is better than I expected but obviously not up to DSLR standards.

This was taken at my local blues club at 1600iso. (With normal noise reduction applied as I always would at this iso speed with my DSLR as well)

I don't think that digital photography has led to an overall dilution of photographic work, I do think that it has diffused it.

Technically, today even a novice can turn out good work from day one. One person's work looks much like another's.

It means the one or two per cent of highly talented people shine out like beacons from the mass. The five or ten per cent under that who would once have been notable are now submerged in the noise of the rest.

When technique was tricky only the keenest bothered. There was that percentage who bought 'proper' cameras and the rest with their snapshot cameras. You could immediately tell their pictures apart. The people who bought 'proper' cameras would also be the ones who took an interest in the 'art' of photography and would rise above the 'mass' in that sense too.

It's easier to be good now but a lot harder to be outstanding.

I lived in Hastings for a while and the gulls there were real hooligans, ripping open bin bags and generally behaving like chavs. Part of the scene, though and to the extent they are a pest, it's our own laziness in leaving easy pickings that makes them the nuisance they can be. I always love watching them fly, though, some of the most agile of birds.

I was a little disturbed in that the gulls in neighbouring Eastbourne were organising themselves in militaristic fashion. I managed to fire off one frame of them before they noticed me and I was forced to flee. The precision of their gull-stepping infantry and the thrumming of their gull winged air support haunts me still.

He used a 6x7. Mentioned in his blog Here

My business partner in my agency had one of these with 3 lenses - I hated the thing, unwieldy, clumsy and noisy in my view.

My partner swore by it and hated with equal force my Hasselblad outfit. Over-priced and poncy in his view!

I always liked Robert Capa's maxim:

If your pictures are no good, you're too far way.

[quote:3496ace15f="TonyM"]Luckily for me the plain gound glass suits my eyes best, so I'm well served by the standard item. Better and free, that is unusual.

Give him my regards if you see him again. Great photographer.

That's very interesting.

The adaptor makes sense to me because my main interest in Pentax is in the lenses - it'd be great to have another range of cameras they could be used on. And I use aperture priority all the time anyway, so no great loss in usability.

Given Pentax's commitment to good quality compact fixed focus lenses, I'd think there would be many people who'd like to use them on other cameras too.

I bet the adpators are expensive!

Seriously, just practise manual focussing. It's faster - only you know the precise point you want to focus on - and it's more accurate.

The raison d'etre of the 35mm macro is that it is a capable general purpose lens with a true macro capability.

But it is a compromise. It's too short focus to be perfect for macro. It's too slow to be an ideal standard lens.

Massive? Hardly. To replace it, you need the 100mm macro and maybe the 40mm as well, though that is also too slow to be ideal. The two together are somewhat more massive.

I seem to have great trouble with the stock people whenever I include a trademark in a pic. What do you know that I don't?