I have difficulty holding any lens hand-held with the Q!
Even a 50mm f/1.4 is still 275mm, and with such a shallow DoF it can be pretty tricky to focus accurately.

I bought a reasonably priced one that has its own aperture ring (crude and inaccurate as it is) and a small tripod mount. Have used it a few times, but not as much as I imagined I would

Matt

The images were shot on a K-x

EDIT: cannot readily find a definitive film DR measurement... some have said up to 19 stops.
But Kodak Vision3 states 14 stops (which matches the K5)

Matt

Also check whether you have the Lens Distortion correction enabled

That takes an age to do and slows down writing considerably!
Matt

@Gary:
Indeed! I couldn't recall who'd first given the link.

The grass is always greener

http://www.stevehuffphoto.com/tag/pentax-645d/

(Worth reading the link just for the landscape shots!)

Matt

I would definitely check the contacts on the SD cards - perhaps cleaning with isopropyl alcohol.

It is possible that the "Secure" part of the SD card has been invoked (perhaps by accident or a card-write error). The SD card has a 16byte password that will prevent all reads & writes to the flash area. Apparently the password is purely a controller thing, and by disassembling it's possible to bypass the controller and read out the data anyway.

The same 'bypass' method can be used when it's the controller that's died.

When using software for attempted recovery I would always engage the write protect switch on the card itself. I've had two or three SanDisk cards fracture and this switch gets stuck (or falls apart). Now switched over to the Samsung Extreme cards which are built like a tank in comparison to SanDisk

Matt

Ah! Yes, PCs can be a pain. I've spent most of my working life with comms etc. On an aside, if you want to do anything at all with a PC then the FTDI chips and cables are cool. They provide DLLs that can enable you to do basic GPIO functions and/or serial. (We use them for creating manufacturing test equipment for our hardware ) http://www.ftdichip.com/Products/Cables.htm
Matt

Bernard,
You'll need to stick to plain C for Arduino
There are plenty of examples and tutorials for it, e.g. http://arduino.cc/en/Tutorial/HomePage
Matt

(Sorry I missed the replies on this...)

If you've been used to 8088 assembler I would stick with Atmel microcontrollers. The PIC are Harvard architecture and can be a real pain!

Atmel USB programming pods are really cheap off eBay. Think I paid £1.80 for mine. You'll need a compiler & programmer - but there are plenty of GCC-based distributions. Personally I used a command-line based Mac OS X build that worked a treat.

The Atmel ATmega & ATtiny series can be hooked up with their 6-pin or 10-pin programming connector to the USB pod. Many of the microcontrollers are still available in DIP packages (though more are QFP these days).

Do be aware that the 8088 is just a CPU, but the ATmega/ATtiny are complete controllers with serial ports, I2C, SPI, counter/timers, oscillators etc all built in!

The Arduino will give you a kick start into Atmel CPUs with a complete environment that you can then fork off into chip-based development later

I built the electronics in this Portal gun replica - originally based on this starting project. Customised and running sounds off a microSD 4GB card! More innards and work in progress photos here, and especially here.

ELM Chan's site is worth rootling through for some source info on Atmel projects.

Hope that gives you some starting points!
Matt

Grip: the grip functions only work when the power switch on the grip is ON (and the body is on too)

Dirt: a RocketBlower does the trick. However, make sure you give the blower a few hard puffs first before using on the mirror etc (to dislodge any dust in the blower itself).

HTH!
Matt