I use a K5 and K-01 for shooting personal videos, just for fun.

Capturing a good soundtrack needs an external microphone. For indoor shots I normally use a Zoom H2 stand-along microphone and then synchronise this audio to the video on editing. Saves trailing cables back to the camera. A Zoom H1 is another option, and cheap lapel mikes can be good for capturing speech.

As noted above, you are not shooting RAW so need to setup the image settings carefully. I tend to use manual everything to stop things changing mid-take. One funny I found is that the auto white balance seems to work on a shot by shot basis, so you can get colour shifts if the light changes. So you may need to set manual colour balance. Also watch out for colour range: sRGB vs studio RGB, as otherwise you can get strange colours in your final video.

Another thing is the narrow depth of field of lenses. You soon learn why professionals take so much time to capture a shot, big lights to allow smaller apertures, setting out marks on the floor for the subject to stand in the pre-set focus range, taking multiple angles to cut together, etc. Its fun but time consuming.

Here is a link to a video shot on a K7 showing what it can do in the hands of somebody more skilled than me:

Uncle Jack

You could buy the Pentax O-ICK1 sensor cleaning kit. I find it works well when a blower doesn't shift it.

I find with my K5 the sensor needs a clean every year or so.

You might want to also reset the camera through the menu in case an old configuration setting has got the camera confused with the new software image.

Yes, I eventually got some dust on my K5 that was noticeable. An extreme contrast test showed the sensor was quite dirty. Afer using the Pentax O-ICK1 kit, the sensor is now spotless. I find it is the best methjod of cleaning my sensor I have used (better than blower or brush).

Its very expensive for what it is, but as this is the first time in the year I have had to clean the K5 sensor I suspect the kit will last a long time and thus the cost is insignificant in the long run. The newer cameras just don't accumulate dirt at the same rate my old DS did.

If you want high quality - you could consider buying a good quality Nikon scanner from eBay, do your scans, and then re-sell it. You probably would not lose too much through this transaction, and you get to "rent" a very high-quality scanner.

I think a scanner with an IR dust sensor system is essential, its amazing how many dust spots and scratches a scanner can extract from the film, and you don't want to spend the rest of your life touching these out manually.

If you are scanning slides, and have lots of them, then a slide loader, like the SF200, is worth its weight in gold. Loading six slides at a time gets tedious very quickly. I can load up 50 and just leave the scanner running in the background whilst I get on with my life. Only works on Coolscan 4000 or 5000 though - maybe other makes have similar options.

To get a Coolscan running on Windows 7 64-bit I had to install Vuescan (which I already had). I could then install Nikonscan which can work through the Vuescan drivers. To be honest I feel its scandelous Nikon never came out with their own 64-bit drivers - film scans can be massive files to handle in a computer so extra memory is always useful.

There is a cheap price for Lightroom 3 in "Leads to Deals" section. I find Lightroom a great way to handle the majority of my RAW processing, with Photoshop rarely being needed (Lightroom will feed processed RAWs directly into Photoshop if required). You can download a trial of Lightroom from Adobe if you want to see if Lightroom approach fits with your working method.

Have also seen deals on more recent versions of Photoshop Elements that should read K20 PEFs (e.g Morgan Computers).

I used to just shoot DNG on my Samsung equivalent of the K20D, although the lack of compression in the DNGs compared to PEF was a small pain (Adobe DNG converter linked above can be used to compressed the Pentax DNGs if you want).

I used the high-speed machine gun mode for the first time ever on Saturday to capture the Olympic road race. The camera slowed down before all of the peleton had swept past. I wonder if the low speed mode would have been better in this situation. I feel 3fps would have been ideal. Maybe the next camera...

Luckily the Brits were all at the front so they were always captured in the high speed burst.

I used to have questions like these, for example: what format to keep pictures in, JPEG, 9-bit TIFF, 16-bit TIFF? Then I got Lightroom and these issues went away - you onlykeep the RAW file and thus you always have maximum quality available. I only produce JPEGs when the file picture has to be sent to someone else, etc.

However in addition, I make a copy of the camera's RAW file to a hard disk on import into the computer, which is stored in a fire safe. These also get archived to Bluray at some point (to prevent accidental deletion). The Lightroom stuff also gets archived. Storage is cheap. I have had accidents where I lost the files on the computer and was fortunate to have these backups to recover from.

If you buy an old colorimeter please make sure it is a model that can cope with wide gamut displays. I used to use an Xrite DTP94, but it was no use with a new wide gamut monitor I bought as the colorimeter filters were not designed for the wider spectrum. I ended up buying a Colormunki spectrophotometer which does not suffer from these issues. I think later Spyders may be wide-gamut friendly.

I really love Bob's third picture. I like to walk in the Scottish hills in winter, and that picture just captures the experience perfectly. A mini adventure.

I have also pondered a 18-135mm lens for just this situation. I normally use a trio of Ltds, but in winter mountain weather it is not the best time to swap lenses. In these conditions I tend to use my 16-50mm, however it is big and heavy, and a little bit wide for me in this situation. To be honest, a 28-70mm would probably be more suited to my photography, although weather sealing is nice in wet weather (that snow gets everywhere).

Paul