Hi Gary. Do you use this diffuser with the flash angled slightly upwards, or pointing straight forwards?

With the lower light AF on the K5 ii I'm thinking it might work better with lenses with not so wide an aperture. For example in a certain level of lowish light my Tamron 17-50 f2.8 will still hit focus most of the time but the 55-300 will be struggling, after all there is less light getting to the AF sensor due to the smaller aperture. I'm wondering if using it on the K-5ii will make a difference, but I won't really know until I try it out.

So one setup I could have is the Tamron 17-50 on the K-5 letting the wider aperture do some of the work when it comes to AF, and the 55-300 on the K-5ii. This would be good for low light/nightime street/event photography which is an area of interest for me. As mentioned I'm hoping my next purchase will be a DA* 50-135 which would replace the 55-300 for this sort of thing. It's rarely necessary to go anywhere near the 300mm end of the lens in these situations, and the smaller aperture means I have to rely really heavily on high ISO and/or flash (one reason I have the Metz 58 - it is powerful enough to throw a useful amount of light onto fairly distant subjects when used with a telephoto lens). The DA* would be much better suited. The 55-300 will still have it's uses as I like to do a bit of wildlife or birding on the rare occasions when I get the chance.

Alternatively if I'm shooting interiors or architecture I might have the Sigma 8-16 (again with the smaller aperture) on the K-5ii keeping the Tamron on the K-5.

...Ordered the K-5ii from SRS...

And one of these from Amazon as my K-5 will now be on second body duty: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Tech-Dual-Harness-Camera-Sling/dp/B002IUOAFQ/ref=sr_1_1?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1353783411&sr=1-1

Now to start saving for a DA* 50-135...

Likewise. Considering the K-5 has an orientation sensor I've often thought it would be a neat feature if you could set it up to switch automatically to a different focus point setup when you switch between landscape and portrait orientations.

OTOH for subjects at a reasonable difference away the error effect of centre point focus and recompose becomes negligible.

PM sent.

Best-in-class low light performance. When I got my K-5, it and the Nikon D7000 were really the only players in the game but the D7000 was never really in it for reasons I will explain below... plus at the time Pentax lenses were a bit cheaper than their Nikon equivalents. Not so much now sadly. Anyway there's a lot more to it than that and I did many, many hours of research but these are a couple of the salient points.

Anyways, before the K-5 came out I was considering a K-7 because of the ergonomics, compactness and some of the features but the less than stellar low-light performance was putting me off. I just really liked it and was thinking along the lines that it would be the perfect DSLR for me if only the low-light performance was better. Then Pentax came along and did exactly the best thing I could have hoped for - released a camera with (almost) exactly the same body and all the features I liked from the K-7, but with best-in-class low-light performance I craved. From that point on all my pennies were saved towards the K-5.

No regrets either. If only it had better low-light autofocus it would be the perfect camera for me... oh, that would be the K-5ii then.

As noted above everybody takes some bad shots... the scary part is that many of these shots seem to have been posted on the photographers' sites and used as advertisements for their work. If this illustrates anything it's that many people out there seem to think that just owning a DSLR qualifies them to be a 'professional' photographer. Skill and talent and even the ability to distinguish a good shot from a bad one are optional extras, at best. Personally I think I take some decent shots but I'd have to achieve a much more consistent standard before I'd even consider 'going pro'.

OTOH the 18-135 WR is priced higher now than it has been in a long time. Perhaps its stand-alone price has been increased to make the saving of buying it as a 'kit' option along with a K-30 or K-5ii look more appealing. :

I really love this lens. It is awesome in terms of sharpness and image quality. It produces beautifully vibrant colours so it should appeal to Pentaxian sensibilities on that score too. There is no such thing as a distortion free ulta-wide zoom of course but even in this area it excels for that type of lens.

On the other hand I do find it difficult to compose really good shots with this lens. With such a wide angle composition becomes more challenging. You definitely can't take a good photograph of just any old subject the way you can with lenses of a more 'normal' range of focal lengths. As a result my 'hit rate' with this lens is decidedly lower than with my other lenses. When I do get a great shot with it though, it is well worth it because a fantastic shot with this lens is often one which simply could not have been taken with any other.

I still think the K-5II is my pick for second body. I haven't yet seen anything to convince me to shell out the extra cash for the 's'. It's the lower light capability of the AF unit I really want and there won't be any difference between the two on that score.