I use to specialise in news pix from helicopters. Some have opening sections in the windows. If not, many have a facility to remove the door. It's not remotely dangerous because you are strapped in.

I covered a grand prix from a helicopter once. We flew from Battersea, put down in a field a mile or so from Silverstone and hid the door in a hedge, then collected it on the way back to London. Those were the days!

Why not ask anyway? Maybe the elf and safety does not stifle every thing yet.

It's pretty simple. If you are desperate to see your work in print, let them use it for nothing. If you are not so desperate, decide what YOU want and ask that.

Market value is what someone will pay, not some notional 'fair' value. If you pitch too low and they jump at it, you may have lost a few quid that you never had. So what?

The best bit of advice on charging is this: if you are not prepared to walk away from the deal, you are simply testing how far backwards you will bend, it does not matter what anyone else thinks. Ask what you want. Negotiate as YOU think fit. That way, whatever happens, you have done it your way and learned from it.

Ask for an offer. If it seems OK, take it. If not, ask a bit more. There are no rules. If you are really prepared to walk away, you are in the strongest position, you have nothing to lose.

As John says, it's not a conspiracy, it's just a matter of being in the same ball park or if not, how far backwards will you bend?

As I have said before, the example here of the 15mm f4 shows why I flogged mine (at a profit ). At open aperture it's not very sharp. At f8 it matches the kit lens, albeit with less distortion.

One of the characteristics of this lens is that if you focus it on, say, a brick wall, the edges will be sharper than the centre. I was rather unhappy with my example and swapped it for another which was exactly the same. This accorded with all the reviews I read too.

A lovely lens in every way except it is optically not that good. Put the 12-24mm on at 15mm and see the difference at f4. Not that the zoom is that great at the edges wide open!

I loved my little15mm but found I was using the 12-24 for preference because it was so much sharper. Were I richer, I'd have kept both.

Why not ask them what they do and see if they will supply that to you for free too?

Unfortunately the screens of most 'crop, sensor cameras are a bit small compared to the full frame ones of older film cameras and the professional DSLRs and quite fiddly to focus by comparison, especially given their shorter focal lengths for a given angle of view.

I don't think there are any tips, just practise until you get it right. On the old VN plate cameras I was trained on as a young a press photographer, we had a 135mm standard lens on a 9x12 plate. For a '2 yarder' as we called it,
usually a portrait, you had hardly any depth of field. But, given that these cameras had no rangefinder, you had to learn to judge it.

Getting a 'fuzzy' was beyond the pale and the senior guys would spare you no humiliation (and sharp digs in the ribs) if you got it wrong. It's surprising, even given such encouragement(!), how accurately you can judge distances to within an inch at 6 feet. But, a skill largely lost now.

It would be nothing like that Chris. Your comparison of understanding industrial power distribution is pure hyperbole.

To upgrade firmware. Download firmware. Unzip to SD card. Plug card into camera. Turn on camera while pushing a button. Wait till the screen shows it's done. Like I said, it is no harder than removing and replacing a lens on a camera.

All the instructions are in 1 2 3 form on Pentax's website. There's nothing daunting about It and as many people say here, a certain amount of computer skill is necessary for a serious digital camera user.

If you can use a modern DSLR, which you obviously can, then upgrading the software is a cinch. Whether it's worth bothering is another matter!

I had a 15mm f4 and though I loved the feel and quality of the lens, it's performance wasn't that good. I found it really needed to be stopped down to f8 before it matched the Pentax kit lens. Basically, my findings matched all the tests I read. One thing it does show is how good the kit lens is.

Then I bought the 12-24 Pentax zoom....and the performance was so much better that I found myself never using the 15mm, in spite of it's compact size.

Beautiful little lens otherwise - and I sold it for more than I paid for it!

I went to see the London Surrey Cycle Race as they swept through Richmond Park today and too a couple of pix.

I quite liked this one - these guys don't half work hard!

The instructions for updating firmware are so simple that if someone couldn't manage that, I doubt they'd ever work out how to get lenses on and off the camera.

If ever you have problems with a camera, one of the first things you will be asked is if you are running the latest firmware.

Manufacturers don't change firmware for the fun of it, after all. If you decide to stay with V.1 and then V.6 improves low light focussing and you want it, you'll get all the intermediate ones along with it anyway so you might just as well keep up to date.

People talk about Pentax as if it is some little guy building specialist equipment for enthusiasts in his business unit on a light industrial estate somewhere.

This is a division of a massive multi-national company. If they want to flog you something at a higher price, it needs to be better. Folk who buy it, whatever the price, because it is Pentax (Hoya? Ricoh?) are letting themselves and Pentax down. Competition strengthens the breed, it only kills off the weak. Pentax are not owed a living.

I took my K5 out without its battery a while back (idiot:roll. In order not to have that happen again, I thought a spare battery for occasional use as a back up would be a good idea. Given the price of the Pentax(?) item and that it would hardly ever be used, I bought a £3.50 item from eBay, a fiver including postage.

It has the same voltage as the Pentax item and appears to be as well made. It performs exactly the same as the Pentax item. It would need to be a good argument to persuade me that I should have bought a Pentax branded item instead.

In the end, buy what is the best combination of quality and value. Loyalty to a piece of metal and glass and electronic circuitry seems perverse to me. If my K5 outfit went AWOL, I'd look around for the best kit available at a price point and buy that, regardless of who made it. That's why I bought the K5, after all.

I'd never buy out of loyalty - and Pentax certainly won't keep making cameras and lenses out of loyalty to their customers. They need to make a profit and if they don't for too long, loyalty to their past customers won't mean a thing.