I've been buying and selling things on ebay occasionally for several years and only had one dodgy transaction in that time, and even that one could well have been Royal Fail's fault.

I've met quite a few ebay people in person to exchange money for goods, and every one has been a delight to meet, talk to and deal with. I've even tilted a glass at the local pub with a couple while discussing Pentax cameras.

That said, when I'm looking at an auction my mind is always running down a list of translations not dissimilar from mowogs!

Indeed, shame on you! and you guys are not bad at making the stuff by all accounts, last time I was in Victoria some of the micro-brew beers were very good.

not a lot of point in that unless they're also full frame coverage, and I fancy they'd be cheaper to make and therefore cheaper to buy as DA small circle lenses.

Top of the line DSLRs to have an uncrippled mount like the Nikons do.

A range of 35mm fast primes to replace the old 50mm 1.4, 1.7 and 2.0.

Fix the Pre-A metering.

Ahh but it's the General Chat section, so in fact we're basically not allowed to discuss photography in here as anything photographic would be better suited somewhere else

whatever you feel comfortable with is fine, just be aware that with the camera on auto ISO opening up the lens by one stop wont necessarily boost the shutter speed by a corresponding stop and vice versa.

I think the relationship between Aperture and Shutter is easier to see with a constant ISO.

That said if I recall correctly the auto ISO biases quite heavily towards the low settings anyway, so for the most part it shouldn't be an issue.

I have noticed that PEF files are sometimes wrongly detected as TIFFs by software which can't handle them properly, I think the encoding Pentax use in PEF is similar to (or based on) that of TIFF.

As Bob said, try re-naming the files to something.pef and see if you can open them in Pentax lab or your RAW converter of choice.

When I was first starting out (I almost put when I was learning, but of course I'm still doing that! I hope!) I formulated this question slightly differently. My formulation was

[quote="Mini Mongoose"] How do you decide when not to have your aperture on f/8?[/quote]Lenses differ of course, but most lenses are at their best in terms of overall image quality at or near f/8. To this day, f/8, aperture priority remains my default "walking around" setting. I only change from this if I have an artistic or practical reason to do so.

Someone above said leave it on Auto ISO for now, I would disagree with this slightly. If you want to ignore ISO until your ready to understand it (a wise decision!) I would set the camera on one fixed ISO and leave it there. I suggest setting ISO 400 for now, as this will give you versitility in your subjects without having to worry about changing ISO until you're ready. If you're already fixed on one ISO and leaving it there, don't change it, I just suggested 400 in case you are on Auto and don't know where to put it.

The reason I say this is that you are currently struggling (as we all did once!) with aperture and shutter speed. You want to keep everything else static while you learn the relationship between aperture and shutter. If you're on Auto ISO the camera will fiddle with the ISO for you, which could lead to some confusing results.

my dad and I have a running joke during ale drinking sessions, whereby every so often a member of the party will feel the need to depart for a few moments to "top up the lager barrel". Can't stand the stuff.

I must admit to having accepted and, yes, even enjoyed one bottle of north american Bud while in Canada though. We had just been rescued from our broken down truck halfway up Mt Washington, and on arrival at the bottom I was greeted by two Canadian mechanics. Their response to the situation was "Hey, how are you doing? your truck broke down? that's a bummer......here! have a beer!". At that moment even Bud tasted like nectar.

Those above have explained how to do this very well, if you're after why you do it, consider this:

In a handheld camera with a normal lens, we use a lens to make a small (~24mm across on a DSLR) picture of something which in reality is quite large (say a few meters across. The optics are designed this way around and optimised to make the image smaller in the most sensible possible way.

Now, consider macro photography. This time you want to make a picture of something which is actually very small, so much so that you may even want to make the image on the sensor larger than the object itself. For this reason, you turn the lens around so that the "back" element is still pointing at the smaller thing.

does that make sense?

The magnification is greater the shorter lens you use, so a 28mm lens on a reversing ring gives more magnification than a 50mm.