Just trying to see what you mean by looking like they're taken through a plate glass window... Not sure i see it, but maybe they're fractionally over-sharpened, or to coarsely sharpened? Maybe that would give you a plate glass window look? Anyway i don't see much wrong with them, other than framing.

Understand where Smeggy's coming from, but the kit lens isn't really geared up for shallow dof shooting. Just not that kind of lens - f3.5 at 18mm doesn't really give subject isolation, it just makes the image look a bit soft!

And not all subjects suit a shallow DOF of course!

A good copy of the kit lens should be acceptable for landscapes and streetscapes, and other general stuff, but bad copies abound. My last one was very ropey. Upgrade to something a bit better (DA17-70mm, Tamron 17-50mm) for more consistent results.

If it's in the pilot, that should narrow it down! A unique series, Twin Peaks. By the way, chinos are back 'in'....

SRS sound like they haven't seen one of these affected pictures! No way is that lens based!

I'm sure I read somewhere about cameras in the film era where you'd focus on your near point and your far point, and the camera would select the focus point and aperture to ensure everything in between was in focus.

Maybe it didn't work too well, as the idea doesn't seem to have caught on.

This is good advice. Don't go off assuming you need to buy X or Y lens based on something someone told you, especially if you don't really understand the reasons why....

Buy lenses according to your OWN need as your ability progresses.

Ultra wides are great but you have to have a certain style of shooting in mind.

I can see it. It's very faint but that's to be expected as it (fortunately!) didn't enter the atmosphere!

To go wider than the 18mm of the kit lens (which is already pretty wide) you are entering 'ultra wide' territory. Which is fun, as you can 'get a lot more in' to your images, and there's an eyecatching sense of distortion you can play with (objects in the foreground are exaggerated in scale relative to the background etc)....

The Sigma 10-20mm pops up regularly in the classifieds and is a safe bet. It comes with a hood of course, but has a 77mm filter ring, if you plan on using filters.

The hood of the kit lens will ONLY work on the kit lens, no matter what size they are, by the way. It's a special design specific to Pentax.

Different filter ring sizes are just a fact of life; it's not possible to design all lenses to be the same width. It's nice when all our lens caps and filters are the same size but it's not really worth basing a lens buying decision on!

I think video is a minority interest compared to stills photography, so even on the US forum which has embraced the new technology with a separate section and Youtube embedding, posts on video are less than a tenth of the posts on stills photography.

Still, video is a function offered by our cameras, so it still seems an omission not to have a dedicated nook of the forum for discussing it. It's been brought up several times in the past, but by now I do not expect anything to come of it.

Looks really good!