Insulation: tape is no good. A piece of 35mm film works wonders

Peter - it's not a case of disconnecting the contacts! It's a case of not shorting out the fifth contact. As I mentioned, I filed out the metal clip to make space for the fifth contact and it nearly worked.

I also disassembled a 5P adapter and removed the fifth pin. That worked well with the AF360, but it's held on by friction. So, I opted for the AF540 using the 5P cord straight in the flash... and all it needed was the film to insulate the pins.

George's suggestion of a cold shoe would work just as well

Matt

Pete,
"P-TTL" stands for Preflash-Through-The-Lens. The preflash and main flash are only tens of milliseconds apart. It's very tricky to tell, but you can just see it.

The K10D gap is much smaller than the *ist-D series AFAIK.

Incidentally, if you put the pop-up flash in "Red Eye Reduction" mode, there is about 1 second between preflash and main flash

Matt

No, you don't need any adapter. The fuller explanation is this:

1. Follow the instructions to put the AF360 into "dumb" slave mode (holding down the Light button etc)
2. Put the switch to Wireless Slave on the flash
3. You will only have the "M" and "A" modes available on the flash
4. Use the popup flash on the camera

Further notes include:
* You can use flash compensation on the pop-up to minimise the impact of the camera's flash
* I'd suggest you use "M" on the camera, and "M" on the flash if you're doing portrait studio style work. (There's a thread on here somewhere...). You can only put the flash to around 1/2 or 1/4 maximum (because it discharges for both the precharge and main flash). If the flash discharges completely you'll have an underexposed shot.
* You can even use a Canon 20D with this setup! (I showed this to a friend and he was blown away by how easy it was!)

* Get a cheap brolley (Hama do one with a hotshoe built in for about £30). Mounted on a tripod, and with a reflector or two you've got yourself a nice little portable studio

HTH!
Matt

I worry about dust less than 1% of the time.
Sure, I have dust. I had loads of it on the *ist-D, and I regularly cleaned the CCD. The K10D has had specks of dust too - all have been removed by the "shake" it does and/or a rocket blower. I haven't yet had to swab clean the K10D

And when I do get dust on the image it takes all of 10 seconds to eliminate with Photoshop.

Don't worry about these "technical" reviews. Just save faster and enjoy the camera

Matt

There's supposed to be a follow up... still Gene Hunt, but no Sam. New character is a woman who's used to psychological analysis... at least that's what the Radio Times said
Matt

There's a tutorial I did for Elements ages and ages ago that does exactly this kind of thing (with LAYERS though):
www.mattmatic.co.uk

It's the "Basic Layers Tutorial".

It's much easier than the history brush as you can save the file as a PSD and come back to it later Works with almost any other technique you can think of, not just B&W....

Have fun
Matt

What you show there Liam is a straight USM.

If you use a large radius - that's called LCE - Local Contrast Enhancement. Perhaps that's what you were thinking of.
(e.g. try: Amount 50%, Radius 50, Threshold 10)

Matt

I agree... but I'll skip them for you
http://www.thelightsrightstudio.com/learning.htm
http://www.thelightsrightstudio.com/tutorials-pdf.htm
http://www.thelightsrightstudio.com/tutorials-video.htm

It's worth having a read though
Matt

It depends on the image and your aim.

The Lights Right Studio is THE best place to learn proper sharpening skills www.thelightsrightstudio.com - I've even left a helpful sticky thread on the subject of sharpening with plenty of links.

And regarding "the best lens" - I've PM'd or replied to you twice, I believe. Perhaps you didn't believe me

Matt

Richard,
It's been covered here many times before...

In general terms, "PK" = "K" = Pentax bayonet mount. And "screw" = "M42".

You can mount M42 screw thread lenses with an adapter - but you have to do stop down metering by hand. That is, you open the aperture to focus, then manually wind down the aperture to the required setting before taking the shot.

K-mount lenses will all fit (however, I strongly suggest you avoid the Ricoh ones as these have an extra pin that can get stuck on the body :shock.
If the lens has an "A" on the aperture (sometimes referred to as KA or PKA) then the metering will work just fine on the K10D. In Pentax lenses, these are the "A" series, e.g. SMC-A 50mm/f1.4

If the lens is an older manual aperture K mount lens, then you have to use stop-down metering. There's currently an issue with doing this - the K10D offers a level of automatic metering that doesn't seem to work very well. You can meter wide open and work it out, but that's a real pain! Hopefully it can be answered or resolved a bit later... These are referred to as "M" series lenses. e.g. SMC-M 50mm/f1.2

Finally, there are the autofocus lenses:
* SMC-F series will work on all Pentax bodies, film and digital.
* SMC-FA series are the updated SMC-F. Some lenses are optically the same, but have a wider manual focus ring (when you want to manually focus).
* SMC-DA are for digital only and work on all Pentax DSLRs
* SMC-DFA are for film and digital, but optimised for DSLRs

Hope I haven't missed any!!
Matt