I think the discussion of whether to keep photos for the interest of your future self/future generations is not really so significant these days, because the problem is not single shots of a subject you decide you're no longer interested in (like you might have on film), but having loads of shots of the same thing that are very similar. My approach is to be ruthless against the duplicates but try to keep the full spread of subjects that I shot.

I take a fairly brutal approach on importing to Lightroom. I delete all the total crap immediately (out of focus, hugely misexposed etc.) then for each group of similar shots I will generally flag one as a "pick" if it's actually good, maybe keep one or two others if they're nearly as good and delete any remaining hangers-on. The survivors then get the post-processing treatment.

This saves time doing post-processing and means I can open any subject/event folder and only have decent shots to look at, and filtering for picks gives me just the best. The other side effect of spending time culling the similar shots is that it makes me think about what makes one better than another, and that has taught me a lot. In fact I've often said that the best thing you can do to learn how to take better photos is to spend time deleting your crap ones.

Obviously this is all from the point of view of an enthusiastic amateur - professionals no doubt have completely different issues to consider.

Could be an issue with the lens rather than the camera. If the aperture doesn't close down as far as the camera wants it to, then you'll get overexposure. I have an old manual lens that does this if it gets too cold, regardless of frame rate. Try having a play with the little aperture lever and see if it gets stuck or moves slowly.

While not truly "macro", the kit 18-55 focuses surprisingly close and actually gives better magnification than a fair few "macro" zooms. That's a very easy starting point for flowers and bigger things like that. You could couple that with a close-up filter for a very cheap set up to see if macro is something you want to spend more time/money on.

The kit lens doesn't have an aperture ring though, so if you go down the extension tube route then you'll need ones with the aperture contacts and they're relatively rare.

Here are a couple of examples from the kit lens with no extra attachments:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/simon_morgan/8466407200/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/simon_morgan/8524352911/

In the end though, after considering all the options I just went and bought a brand new Tamron 90mm Macro and love it!

I manually changed the prefix to end in a 1 when that happened on my K5, so I get files called things like IMG10123.

It's a lens that's a hundred years old, on a digital camera! Why does there need to be a point to it?

Excellent job getting it to work. I'd quite like to see what that whole setup looks like, too.

Cheers for that. Interesting stuff.

Interesting - where did you find the information about the gyro sensors? I'd be curious to find out more if a more technical breakdown of the SR system has been published somewhere than the usual marketing guff that just tries to dazzle you with buzzwords.

I've been doing a daily photo project since the new year, precisely because I wanted to break out of these patterns! I was trying very hard to always have a camera on me, constantly look out for opportunities etc. but I've found that it all gets a bit much if I fixate on it so I've loosened my interpretation of "daily" to be "on average, one per day" (with a proviso that taking two shots from the same "shoot" doesn't count!).

Firstly this is because however much people bang on about seeing the beauty around you, I do fundamentally spend most days going to work in an industrial estate - I don't see that many photogenic subjects on an average work day! Except for my kids, of course, but I'm deliberately trying to avoid just taking pictures of them to try to maintain some variety.

Secondly, I found it did start to feel like a bit of a chore - like I have to carry my camera so I can meet the quote - and I think it's good to have a bit of a breather. Occasionally just enjoy things for what they are and not for how they might look in a picture.

I like this a lot!

All good, but #3 is fantastic