I use a portable kit made up of 2 x light stands from 7dayshop.com, 2 x shoot-through umbrellas that also have silver lined covers for reflecting light, 3 x Seculine Twinlink Radio receivers, 2 x AF540FGZ flashes, and 2 x AF500FTZ flashes.

It cost a lot less than studio strobes and it's easily portable for use outside.

If you go the route of studio kit with softboxes, air damped stands, monobloc heads, modifiers (snoot, honeycomb, barn doors etc.), backgrounds etc., you could easily use up all of your budget I think.

Looks like it's double glazed too, so pretty impressive I'd say.

Lovely shots of some old classics. 'ealth 'n safety will have something to say about that unguarded belt in #1 though

Can you supply all of the EXIF data for the second image. I doubt very much that it was shot at ISO 100 unless you were in a room with almost no light.

I once bought a SMCP 135-600mm lens complete with original flight case and close focussing lens for less than £200, a SMCP-FA 50mm 1:2.8 Macro for £100, and a SMCP-FA 135mm for not much more.

Have you tried another set of new batteries? Rare, but you could have a faulty one.

One other thing to consider is the light loss when using a teleconverter. The DA* 300mm lens has a maximum aperture of f4, this will be reduced to around f5.6 or f6.3 (I'm not sure of the maths to work it out). This may not be fast enough for you depending on the lighting environment when you intend to use it.

I've just received a Sigma 70-200mm 1:2.8 EX DG OS HSM lens from those nice people in Watford. It needed -9 AF adjustment to correct for front focussing at 200mm.

To be fair, I made the adjustment under artificial light and with flash. I'll repeat the adjustment tomorrow in daylight.

I nearly wrote sunlight then, I don't want to upset anybody so I changed it to daylight.

The SMC Pentax DA* 300mm lens (the same as in your link) has both SDM and the older screw driven focus mechanisms.

If you were to use a SMC Pentax-F 1.7x AF adapter, neither of the lens's focussing mechanisms are used, instead, you roughly focus manually, then half press the shutter button and the AF adapter does the focussing. This is also how it can make a manual focus (MF) lens into auto focus (AF).

To summarise, the SMC Pentax-F 1.7x AF adapter works with both AF and MF lenses,but the AF mechanism of AF lenses is not used.

Hope that helps you understand how it works.

EDIT: Correction to my previous post:- Having re-read your original post I can see that TC-S is meant to be short for teleconverters, in which case your salesman was incorrect. In english it would be written tc's or TC'S.

I think it's worth remembering that the *istD camera will be 10 years old next year. That's a very long time where digital electronic imaging technology is concerned and a lot has changed in that time.

10 years was not such an issue in the days of mechanical film cameras. I think it's called progress