The DA35+K7 looks the business. The DA40 certainly looks better than it ever did on the K20d!

USING M or K LENSES:

In the 'custom' menu:

'Using aperture ring' - set to 'permitted'.
'Green button in manual' - set to 'Tv Shift'.

Now with the camera in 'Manual', pressing the green button will set the correct* shutter speed for whatever aperture you have selected on the aperture ring.

*or, sometimes, nearly correct! Check the histogram & fine tune aperture/shutter speed as needed.

I can well imagine it's virtually impossible to keep a moving subject in focus and steady at 200mm hand held! Bad enough with a regular video camera. Good manual focusing practice though

I have the 24mm version, which sometimes (usually!) lets me apparently stop it down to f1.0! (Or so the camera display tells me). This leads me to believe the contacts are a bit iffy on these lenses, although mine seemed to expose correctly, somehow. Very sharp lens, not the best build quality perhaps though.

Typical... it's cloudy! I have seen the Northern Lights once before in the UK, and even took some hopelessly poor photos of it. It was a rather subtle display though! Faint shifting green veils. Still wonderful to behold.

The K-x is lovely, and I have had a go with it alongside the K-7 - both feel really well built, and there isn't as much difference between the pentamirror and pentaprism viewfinders as I had expected. (In fact I could hardly detect any!)

But is it a genuine step up from the K200d? The improvements seem more marginal than if I went for the K-7. Some k-x test images seem a bit soft - but that's possibly the noise reduction in jpeg mode.

>>>Thanks Jim - that's cheaper than the one I was looking at!

I think you're right. If they announce something interesting, the remaining K-7 prices may drop a bit.

A DA21mm came up recently and I was thinking of going for it, but as desirable as it is, my 16-45 is pretty good at 21mm, and if I want to travel light, I have a 24mm MF prime.

I love the 'cloud curves' in shot 2, but the shot just wanted a break in the clouds to bathe the rocks in light.

After selling my narrowboat (sob) I have a little money to spare, and since the boat was my home of 5 years, I am going to treat myself a bit.

My quandary is whether to get one of those da*Ltd lenses I have been lusting after - the 15 or 21mm, or upgrade to a K-7 body. I find the DA* pancakes very desirable, but with the 15 and the 21mm, my 16-45mm zoom does also offer reasonably similar iq although with the drawback of size and weight. The K-7 would seem to offer better high iso and faster performance than my K200d so there would be a more obvious advantage.

I can always indulge my love of primes with A and M lenses, which I think look the part on a K-7 (always thought little primes looked strange on K200/K20ds).

Congrats! Nice sharp shots, and lovely 'bokeh'. I like the angle of the bouquet in no. 3, but prefer the concrete paving in 1 and 2 I think. Perhaps playing around with the shooting angle might have made for an even more satisfying comp? Placing the flowers on a step or the edge of a table so they overhang a bit, and you have another angle to contrast with the stems? 'The possibilities are endless' lol