It's an excellent flash and I think you'll be very pleased with it, especially at that price.

One thing to be aware of with the AF360 is it's battery door lugs, which are actually mounted on the body of the flash, not the door cover. They have a tendency to break as they are poorly designed.

Inspect yours when you get it and make sure they are OK. It's an expensive repair because the main flash case needs to be replaced.

I use Sanyo Eneloop batteries in mine because they put less pressure on the door from the inside. These batteries are very slightly shorter than standard NiMh cells and closer to the size of commercially available disposables.

It doesn't meet your tilt/swivel criteria though. The AF360 head tilts, but doesn't swivel. You'd need the AF540FGZ for that but it's significantly more expensive.

Muchas gracias Lynton. I do live in Spain but I still don't trust the Correos and it gives me an excuse to go back and see the family too.

The only similar issue I have experienced is fitting a bellows to a *istD which had the battery grip fitted. It couldn't be done.

The remedy was to either remove the grip or fit a short extension tube between bod and lens.

Shooting through a fence like that isn't a problem if you can get your lens right up close to it (not touching) and your subject is some distance away from it.

The fence will be so out of focus in your image you may not even notice it. If you do, you can crop the image to remove it.

Sigma, Metz, and of course Pentax make bounce/swivel flashes that are P-TTL compatible with your camera ... but not for £100 I'm afraid.

An older style hard lack plastic body cap will fit, but it won't lock. Newer caps have a hole to lock the cap in place in the same way that a lens is locked onto the body.

Older caps a fine and much better than the translucent white shipping cap you get with a body nowadays.

Interesting task. Imported into Lightroom, 9 images saved at 1 stop exposure spacing, HDR'd in Photomatix Pro 3.1, re-import into Lightroom for final editing. It's not cropped because I like it as it is and to constrain it to 8 X 6 loses some of the foreground interest.

Besides that, whenever I've been to Manchester, the sky always looked like that.

It's probable that the OP has resolved this issue in one way or another since he raised the topic in August 2008.

Hefty, my post was acknowledging the quality of Brian's gear, not the capabilities of the AF500FTZ.

I don't think Pentax ever made another flash, before or since the AF500FTZ, that provided multiple flash strobing.