I hope you're right Tim, but if Pentax follow the lead of other technology manufacturers, they just might do exactly that.

Take Inkjet & Laser printers for instance. They used to cost an arm and a leg which made the consumables look cheap enough. Things have changed dramatically however. They are almost giving the things away with a packet of cornflakes, but the consumables have, if anything, increased in price.

Once Pentax have sold a camera, that's it, no more income from that camera unless it goes wrong outside warranty or needs servicing. But it will need a new battery every couple or three years, and they'll never give you 2 sets of batteries, so we'll all need to buy a spare, right.

Perhaps that's just me being cynical, but it could happen. After all, they have a somewhat captive audience with all those Pentax users that have more than one or two lenses. A new camera model that requires a custom battery might annoy some, but eventually they'll buy just to keep up with the latest technology.

Neither of the two links works for me. I've ordered the Ansmann Energy 8 anyway. £40 form Picstop, £50 from Warehouse Express.

You shouldn't completely discharge any battery to the point where it reads 0V, or near to it. When fully discharged, a batteries internal resistance increases to a point where it might not recharge at all. To have all batteries (cell's actually) at the same level of charge before recharging is a good idea, but a 1.2/1.5 V Cell should not be discharged to much below 1.0V per cell. The best way to achieve this same level of charge is by using a charger that can also discharge to a safe point before recharging. I have a similar problem of recharging cell's in that I have only the type of charger that does one or two pairs at a time.

I'll be buying an Ansmann Energy 8 (takes up to 6 AA cells) to resolve this problem and rejuvenate my cells. The Energy 16 is a good option if you need to recharge 12 AA cells at atime IE: You have 4 in the camera, 4 in the battery grip, and 4 for a flash. Both Ansmann chargers will recharge the lot in about 4 hours. There is an Energy 4 model available too which does up to 4 AA cells at a time.

Ken,

If landscape photography was easy, we'd all be out doin' it instead of sitting here pretending we know something about it

In my humble opinion the SMC Pentax 12-24mm DA zoom makes a very good landscape lens. The 16-45mm DA zoom is pretty good too. If you want ultra wide, have a look at the 10-20mm zoom from Sigma. Folks here seem to like it. Above all else, make sure in the first instance that you buy a lens of rectilinear construction rather than fisheye because you'll be wanting any straight lines in your image to be straight, not bent.

Regards,

Liam,

Me too. I know loads of 'stuff' about seemingly unimportant things and not enough 'stuff' about what matters.

For anyone interested to know a bit more about hyperfocal distance and its uses, have a look at this page

Cheers,

Liam,

The focus point you describe is called the 'hyperfocal distance' that I referred to in my post above.

Cheers,

Oh, and one other thing. . .

Shoot in RAW mode.

You can fix an aweful lot more issues in a RAW image than you can JPG.

Cheers,

Ken,

George has said it all really. If you want to shoot landscapes for your own pleasure, your camera, with a decent wide angle lens will be great.

If you eventually want to sell your images to stock agencies, you probably have the wrong camera, but a great one to start with.

To start you off, search the web and learn about hyperfocal distance. Learn it, master it, and you will eventually achieve the results you want. Focussing a lens at its hyperfocal distance together with a small aperture is what makes those 'killer' landscape shots stand out as being totally in focus.

Then look at using circular polarising, and neutral density graduated (ND-Grads as they are known) filters to 'enhance' the scene. Just don't overdo it, you will not improve much on nature, just help it a little.

Then learn about natural lighting. If you had 16 hours of daylight at one particular landscape scene and you took one shot per hour, each of the 16 shots would look subtly different. The first and last shot would look wildly different. You'll need to learn which parts of the day produces the lighting effect that you need to accomplish your desired result.

That should be enough homework for now. Good luck, next week I'll be asking questions

Regards,

Thanks for the feedback Bob.

Bob,

I did misunderstand, apologies for that. Having re-read your original post, I think if your colleague, who is unable to set WB in certain modes, has upgraded their cameras firmware, it may indeed be an update that has 'brought this about'.

What is probably more accurate to say is that their camera is operating correctly and an update has corrected an issue that is still present on your camera, because you haven't updated it.

I suspect that whilst you are able to select a WB other than AWB in the various picture modes on your camera, it is probably being ignored and your camera is using AWB anyway. The test I suggested in my previous post should confirm that. Further, I think your colleagues camera is working as it should and that the whole idea of 'auto' picture modes is that they don't need any technical photographic knowledge (like how to set white balance) to use them, which is why it is selected automatically when any of those modes are used.

I think I can safely say that photographers who know their trade/hobby generally dislike these auto modes and set their cameras to fully manual or Tv/Av at the most and prefer to exercise their own control over what the camera is doing. The original *istD doesn't even have any of these auto picture modes.

Keep us informed anyway, and update your firmware at your earliest convenience.

FWIW: If your colleague shoots in RAW format, the WB setting, however it is chosen, is somewhat academic as it can be changed/set during post processing.

Cheers,