This is part of a sculpture by Anish Kapoor, currently standing in the courtyard of the Royal Academy.




Taken with my K100D Super + SMC Pentax-A 28mm F2.8; this is a small crop of the original image.

Derby-bound

There's more than one dimension involved in this question, of course. For example I understand the technicalities quite well, and very well as far as the digital technology is concerned, but am still not particularly good at composing a picture.

That's what I did, and I found one on eBay. Was also looking for a general-purpose prime, in my case to replace the 18-55mm zoom that came with my K100D Super. Pleased so far.

The autofocus shouldn't 'drift' with age, because your K10D uses the actual image through the lens to adjust focus in the same way that you or I would when using a manual focus lens.

In a system where the camera assessed the distance to the target, then adjusted the lens mechanism to match it without feedback, then it would be possible for the focus system to go out of alignment after heavy use. But a 'passive autofocus' system is inherently self-adjusting. If the mechanism was absolutely knackered of course, then it might not be able to focus properly - but you wouldn't get focus confirmation in that case.

I'm a Linux user. For simple editing, my favourite image browser, gthumb often suffices. It will resize / crop / rotate / adjust brightness & contrast and has a simple 'enhance' feature that usually works well. It doesn't accept raw files, but these can be converted to ppm with a (free) command line tool called dcraw. Another useful feature of gthumb is its ability to create simple web albums.

For anything more complicated, I use the GIMP. This is available for Windows as well as Linux, and is also free. It doesn't have all the Photoshop bells and whistles but is a very sophisticated image editing program.

http://gthumb.sourceforge.net/
http://www.cybercom.net/~dcoffin/dcraw/
http://www.gimp.org/

Well, Mike's Sigma fell through somehow, but happily I've become the owner of a PENTAX-A 28mm f2.8 in 'near mint' condition thanks to eBay, at the cost of £52.23 + P&P.

Will let you know how I get on when it arrives.

Honestly, I don't have a lot of ego invested in the notion of myself as a photographer, so I wouldn't be upset. I'd like to improve though, and the comments in this thread have definitely given me something to think about.

That's fair enough - thanks for the clarification.

Could I be forgiven for posting a few images I've taken on a non-Pentax camera to invite comments? Not as an ongoing practice - it's just that I have two or three photos I've taken in recent years on an Olympus digital that I'd like to post.

Thanks,
James