but the K200D has HDR mode, which in theory should give you an extra stop or so when it's enabled.

I was shooting red kites (with my camera) at the red kite centre in wales recently. There were several Canikon 'togs there too, and as far as I could tell we were ALL using manual focus.

good first try, you'll want a tripod to steady it up a bit. Even so you'll still need to keep shutter speed above ~1/60th if you want to avoid the cursed thing moving.

The moon moves surprisingly fast.

I had a Bernoulli Box II on my original 286 PC. Trouble with it was the driver took up so much RAM you couldn't run anything with it installed. Had to copy files on or off the box drive then re-boot without the drivers to run any programs!

as a side note, the 5.25" carts for the aformentioned Bernoulli would only hold 1 or maybe 2 PEFs.

I've noticed that recently, it's never been a problem with my Pentax A series lenses (although I only have one), but it seems to be the case with my Tamron Adaptall lenses with the A series adaptor

TIFF is a very poorly defined standard with a number of variations.

you can have 8 or 16 bit TIFF (tiff8 and tiff16 as Mac mentioned)

you can also have various types of compression applied, bizzarely including JPG, so it's actually possible to have a TIFF which is compressed just like a JPG.

Most TIFF images are uncompressed as this is the most widely supported form.

if you want to freeze action at night, you only have two options

1) Higher ISO

2) use a Flash

You'll need to get your shutter speeds up above 1/100th of a second (or higher if the subjects are doing anything faster than just walking past and waving).

In that situation I would tend to select TAv mode, pick the aperture/shutter combo I want and let the camera deal with the ISO. Keep in mind though that even the K20D doesn't have a huge amount of latitude in ISO steps so you'll want to be ready to adjust shutter and aperture to keep ISO in a sensible range.

I just got a Sigma 530ST, haven't used it in anger yet but it seems to be fine considering it's a £109 flash with bounce and swivel.

none of my film cameras are weather sealed, so I'd have to be using my K10D.

I stand surprised