Are you in APSC mode, with speed / FPS prority enabled? In FPS priority the camera will keep shooting in 'machine gun mode' whether the focus is perfect or not. Perhaps the buffer was full - have you turned in-camera corrections off?

Hi Karlo! Best to reduce the image size in photoshop (or similar) to 800pixels along the longest side... give it a little sharpen after resizing for best results!

Or you could upload to flickr, which resizes your shots and sharpens them automatically.

Tesco Basic basmati rice comes in a useful size and a nice soft plastic bag. Tastes pretty good too! Add plenty of salt, cover with boiling water (an inch of water over the top of the rice), cover and gently simmer for 15 minutes. Turn off the gas and leave covered for 5 mins.

I don't need a special day to use a Pentax camera... or to sport a pair of smeggy pants for that matter...

Actually I would be up for some sort of special meet to celebrate 'World Pentax Day', but it always seems to catch me on the hop...

But in mono how can we be sure whether its a red or a grey?

Her complexion may be partly the source of her shyness to be photographed. I'm sure she'd be delighted with the 'lightly enhanced' photo of her!

Even if it was 'OK' to do so, I can't imagine the mentality of people who would want to...

No, I know just what you mean!

Very nice shot, no.2.

Or snip them?

For me the hairs are OK. The colour of the wall goes very well with the cat's fur. His eyes stand out nicely from the various shades of beige in the shot.

The blown area does bother me slightly. Careful not to overdo the highlight recovery though! One of my bete noirs

Should not make any difference in manual focus though... if what you see isn't what you get when relying on the focussing screen, something isn't right. Does the dioptre need adjusting perhaps? [edit - just spotted you already did that]...

But given that these are 100% crops, aren't they within the 'margin of error' when focussing using just your eyes? For hypercritical focusing with narrow dof, live view is essential, especially as Pentax don't have a proprietary split focussing screen.