this is very good advice. The two lenses you have are capable of most things to a greater or lesser degree, play for a while and see what you enjoy most. I would extend (2) to read

(2) don't buy cheap rubbish. When you know what you want to do, check out the lenses which can do it, with regard to value but not price. This will tell you how much you need to save up. It can be depressing that you have to wait a long time, but remember "Buy cheap, buy twice".

This doesn't mean you always have to buy the most expensive lenses on the market, but you should always be sure a lens is fit for the job you want it to do before you buy it. Otherwise you'll just end up spending at least as much again on a better one, or wishing you could.

I would be inclined to send it send it to Pentax with a note along the lines of "why do you suppose this happened?"

they'll probably blame the SD card, but it might be worth a shot.

so it appears in the original raw file when opened in a raw converter?

did this shot fill the card? I've seen digital cameras corrupt the last shot on a full card before now (though admittedly I've never seen a DSLR do this).

that's a classic corrupted JPG file

needless to say they have proper off site backups now! The discs were (and as far as anyone can determine still are) in a fire proof safe.

Unfortunately no one had considered the possibility that the whole end of the building would be totally destroyed by the largest explosion in peacetime european history. Thank God no one was in there, from the pictures I saw of the interior not many would have got out alive.

I'm not sure how stable flash RAM is for long term storage, I don't think I would recommend its use as an archive medium.


Of course there is always the good old fasioned tape streamer, these are probably beyond the means of most of us.

indeed, that's one of the things that confuses people I think! the important thing is that we all get a method which works for us, and don't get any nasty surprises.

Not everything that is a good idea is necessary, your method will work nicely, as will his proposal of using a DVD-RW as temporary storage, as does mine.

It's well worth checking your older backups, I was quite unplesantly surprised recently to discover an almost 100% failure rate among a particular batch of unbranded DVD's I was using about 4 years ago. Thankfully there was nothing vital on them.

I'm honistly not sure that branded discs are automatically more resistant to this, I just like to hope. I'm planning to start using 2 different reputable brands with different dye types for backups I really don't want to loose.

Paranoid I know, but I have some photos I would be VERY unhappy about loosing.

Yes, that is exactly what we are saying.

I recommend a directory on a HDD which you fill up until it hits 4.3GB and then burn to DVD, but your solution would also work well. RW disks are really not suitable for long term storage, this is not what they are designed for.

+ vs - is more or less moot now since almost all drives burn both. They are just standards for the burn process and which is better varies from drive to drive. With my LiteOn drive + disks generally work better, but YMMV.

What is more important is disk quality. I have no end of unbranded disks which burned fine at the time but are now unreadable a couple of years on. I used to rate DataSafe disks highly as affordable but good, however in recent times I have had an increasing number of bad burns on those. I have now switched to Verbatim disks and these seem very good.

Also, burn slowly. I have a 16x writer and 16x rated disks, but I never burn a backup faster than 4x.

There is a simple test to see how far you need to go.

Imagine your computer packs up and the hard drive contents cannot be recovered. How hard and how long do you cry? Most of us would say easily enough to justify a simple DVD in a cupboard backup system (as you suggest).

Now what if, as happened to a company I worked for, the oil depot over the back fence explodes, rendering the building unsafe and reducing the computer room (which also contains the backup disks) to 100 tons of rubble.

You might say that's very unlikely (and God willing it will never happen to any of us), but it can happen and it's up to each of us to weigh up the anguish if it did happen against the cost and hassle of protecting against it.

I would suggest that most of us amateurs have a small subset of photographs which we could never replace and would be devastated to loose. A wedding, a newborn baby, loved ones now departed. Here the monetary value is irrelavent, they can't be replaced for any price.