Lovely photo's, as always.

I have a number of White Wagtails nesting near my house and they are constant visitors to my garden. They pick dead & drowning insects from my swimming pool, and even make off with my cat's food. Never taken a photo of them yet though.

I believe that many of the FA series lenses are optically identical to their F series predecessors, just repackaged in a newer style body, that's all (wouldn't we all like to be able to do that?).

The repackaging trend continues today. The DA* 200mm is allegedly the FA 200mm with a new body and some extra electronics/mechanics to handle the lack of an aperture ring on the DA* range, and maybe different lens coatings.

This is the smc Pentax-F 50mm 1:1.7 lens.

This is the smc Pentax-FA 50mm 1:1.4 lens. Expect it to finish at over £200 though.

Here's another FA 50mm 1:1.4 lens

Hey, don't give up so easily. It seems you've had a tough time so far, but life will improve if you want it to.

Changing brands will not bring your goal any closer, in fact, it might make it less achievable. Nikon and Canon equipment can be much more expensive than the equivalent Pentax kit.

As you are very much a novice photographer (a place we've all had to start from), I think it likely that you may not have your viewfinder diopter adjusted correctly. To set it, remove the lens and look through the viewfinder at a uniformaly white/bright surface, or the sky. In the viewfinder you will see some black lines, roughly box shaped. Adjust the little slider that is on top of the viewfinder from right to left/left to right until those lines appear pin sharp.

Refit your lens and try manual focusing again and see if it is any easier for you.

Your camera has a built in focus confirmation system. If you could learn to use it, you could then look at manual focus lenses which are much cheaper than auto focus ones.

To try it, just set your camera's focus mode switch to MF, then try focusing your kit lens manually. Look for the red box that appears in the viewfinder, and the little green hexagon icon in the bottom of the viewfinder display. If the green hexagon is illuminated, the lens is focused.

Try manual focus for a few days and see how you get on.

Above all else, keep yourself and your children safe. They'll love looking back at your photos in years to come.

So I wonder what Bob, the_archaeologist, has to say about all this?

It's very odd that he was able to start this thread on 10/6/2012, when his last login was made on 9th April 2012.

If he really stayed logged in for two months prior to making the post, I wonder why he has nothing more to say ?

Picturenaut HDR from HDRSoft is free.

You camera has what is known as the Pentax K mount. Other variations exist like KAF, KAF2, & KAF3, the latter being SDM only as it has no screw drive for the auto focus mechanism. Yours is actually the KAF2 mount I believe, but the basis of the design is the bayonet mount.

All K mount lenses from Pentax and other manufacturers like Sigma, Tamron etc. will fit your camera. Some of the older lenses however will have reduced capabilities. These limitations are listed in your camera's manual.

Older Pentax made lenses having suffix's of K, M, or A are manual focus, so no use to you and should therefore be avoided. There is actually no lens having a K suffix because these were the first lenses made for the K mount and were simply named smc Pentax (sometimes SMC Pentax), but they are often sold as such on auction sites.

The only Pentax made lenses that are auto focus have the suffix F, FA, FA-J, DA, DA-L, D FA, and DA*. As yet, there is no smc Pentax-DA or DA-L 50mm lens, but there will be a DA version soon. The D FA 50mm lens is a macro lens and whilst it's a super lens, it may not give you the 'effects' that you are looking for as it has a max. aperture of f2.8.

If the 'effects' that you referred to in your original post are the out of focus highlights at large aperture's (bokeh), then you need to be looking for a lens with a higher number of aperture blades. The more blades, the rounder the bokeh. Some lenses even have rounded aperture blades to enhance bokeh. See the list in the link to Boj's site in my previous post.

Bookmark that site in your browser, it is our Pentax K mount hardware bible and you'll be referring to it a lot.

Welcome to the forum Janice.

Pentax auto-focus lenses will work fine on your camera. smc Pentax-F 50mm 1:1.7 or the newer smc Pentax-FA 50mm 1:1.7. There are also 1:1.4 (f1.4 maximum aperture compared to f1.7) versions of both lenses.

There is also the smc Pentax-DA* SDM 55mm 1:1.4 lens that you might like, but I can't remember if the K10D is SDM compatible. Others here will know and I'm sure they'll comment soon.

All of the lenses I've mentioned are a tad faster than your friends 1:1.8 and produce excellent bokeh when used wide open at max. aperture.

A list of all of the Pentax 50mm (and similar) lenses can be found here. Only the F, FA, D FA, and DA* lenses will give you auto focus though, all the rest are manual focus.

BTW: These lenses are often affectionately referred to as "nifty fifty" and I doubt that there are many semi-serious photographers who don't have one in their bag.

There is an smc Pentax-FA 50mm 1:1.4 available here at a good price.

I keep all my images on my PC. Periodically I back them up to my NAS box using FreeFileSynch.

My NAS box is on 24x7 and backs up every 4 hours to two attached HDD's.

I also periodically back everything up to HDD's which I keep in my fire safe.

Even with my belt 'n braces solution, I was recently (almost) caught out when I needed some data from my Outlook Archive .PST file, which was corrupted on my PC, on my NAS box, on it's two attached HDD's, and one of my two fire safe copies. Fortunately, the other fire safe copy had a valid .PST file on it and I was able to recover the data.

Also, I had a HDD fail in the NAS box. I took the failed HDD back to UK where it was replaced under warranty. During my absence the NAS box was turned off and disconnected from mains power.

On my return, NAS wouldn't boot. Another drive had failed whilst I was away and when it was doing nothing. At that point, My NAS was dead and all my data was gone, except that which was on my backups. I rebuilt the NAS RAID array using the two surviving drives and copied some of my backed up data back to it. That process took almost 4 days but worth the wait. Had I not had reliable backups, I'd have lost about 40 years worth of images and countless other critical information.

The moral of this story is:- Keep multiple backups from different dates for as long as you can, you never know when you might need an older copy of a file than that which is on your most recent backup.

I have the 150-500mm and I'm well pleased with it.

Others who have had the opportunity to try both lenses say that the IQ of the 50-500mm is better.

The 50-500mm lens is obviously much larger and heavier than the 150-500mm lens.