Concerning longer lenses, I have a tamron 70-300mm and was wondering if would be worth getting hold of an 80-320 instead? The things that annoy me about the tamron are its softness @300mm and its painstakingly slow focus. Would the pentax be sharper and focus faster or is it simply the body motor that determines focussing speed?

It would be useful to know if anyone has used both of these lenses and could confirm the above?

As far as a general purpose zoom goes, I would agree that the 16-45 is very fine, and doubtless the 16-50 will be too...

I recently made the change to raw too, and what a difference it makes . My only gripe is that hard drive space gets eaten up very quickly!

Hi,
I would have thought that an ND grad would be essential, to balance the difference in brightness between ground and sky, especially at dawn. different types are available - hard or soft gradation, and how dark the dark bit is. If you have a very very wide lens you may need quite big filters to avoid vignetting.

A polariser would also be quite useful to make the sky saturated. Again, if you have a very wide lens (<18mm on digital) a polariser would produce odd effects in the sky (if you want to know why, ask a physicist). If you want to buy one get a 'circular' one - it then doesn't confuse AF.

Enjoy.

I think its great - a train would only be a distraction, making it harder to take in the wonderful curve of the track. Nice picture

So its best to believe photoshop then...

I'm having similar problems - and I was wondering if anyone would be able to suggest why. I'm using raw, and converting in Adobe camera raw. The only thing is, the preview in ACR that one uses to tune the image is wildly different (saturation wise) from the jpeg I see later on in windows explorer (exploder?). I've done my best to calibrate my laptop screen with adobe gamma, but in this situation it seems as though the programs are using different profiles or something. Could this be the case :

Can anyone help me out?

p.s the second bird looks best to me - even though my monitor may not be calibrated properly

Try this Pete - http://www.pbase.com/cameras/pentax/smc_pm_50_17
They're not all necessarily with the K10d but some will be

incidentally, Pbase's search by camera/lens function works well and can be quite useful for exactly this situation...

edit - Just hit 50 (worthwhile I hope) posts!

It was beautifully clear over edinburgh Quite lucky considering the weather forecast said it might have rained.

Have a look at the LowePro slingshot bags. They're a snug fit (even into the smaller '100AW' I fit in a dl2, film body, 70-300, 28, 50, 18-55 and extension tubes ) Their design means they go from on your back to you front in a single slide. http://www.lowepro.com/

Anyone heard from 'Teogin'?