The red snapper sounds interesting. There are times when the wind is strong that you need a bit of extra weight and stability. I think you need a reasonably solid tripod, please don't get me wrong, some unbranded £10 job isn't going to be a great idea on that I can agree! All I'm saying is you don't always need to go to extremes if you're an infrequent tripod user. For many of us the tripod stays under the bed 90% of the time.

You wouldn't put one of these




on these




...if all you do is the supermarket run and an occasional motorway journey

I like the overgrown 'jungle' feel to no.1. Looks a fantastic place.

Very nice mix of natural and artificial light, but yes I think including the top of the mast would have been worth sacrificing some of the reflections at the bottom.

Good crisp shots. Interesting to see someone shooting Ektar. I have a roll sat in the fridge waiting to be loaded

I really doubt that's ever going to happen and I don't see the point in going around telling noobs that it is, unless you have shares in Manfrotto! my tripod is cheap, but it's not the cheapest and it's not made of balsa wood. I'm confident it's up to the job. And if a bystander's going to knock over a tripod, I don't think they're going to care how expensive it is

Now I would consider spending more to get a tripod which was taller, lighter, or offered more choice of shooting angles, but that's another thing.

I took some 25 second exposures on sunday. My hands are rock steady, but I doubt I could have pulled that off without my excellent Quantaray tripod with one foot missing and patched up with duck tape

Mirror slap can be avoided with MLU, and I think shutter blur won't affect exposures over about 1/8 if not less.

Mine had the same issue. To be honest it always wobbled, but in the end i'd get softness on one side depending on the orientation. A shame as it was otherwise a superb lens. I got the tamron 17-50 and i'm happy with it. The barrel seems a lot tighter, and extends less. Miss that 16mm end though!

Even a cheap ass tripod works fine if you don't use the column extension, or use it in a force 9 gale. Probably won't stand frequent hard use, but will probably last many years if you're reasonably careful with it and don't plan on taking it out every week. Clearly if you're majoring in photography which requires a tripod or making a living from it, you'll want the best you can afford. But as far as a cheap tripod being worse than handholding, this is just untrue

Lol that was like a barbershop quartet of camera advice!

It's probably because the camera isn't compatible with SDHC cards. However it would be worth checking if there's a firmware update on the Pentax support site. Otherwise stick to regular SD cards or multimedia cards (MMC).