Some of you may have seen in the gallery yesterday, the misfortune which befell my lovely new DA 55-300.

As well as the separation of mount from lens body (at least one screw thread stripped there), the focussing action is very rough (grating even), suggesting that some small fragments have fallen into that mechanism?

Can anyone share positive experience of having a lens repaired and the subsequent performance of the lens afterwards.

Who have members used for repair work? I have heard of Johnson's via this forum but wondered who else is available (in the Midlands) or whether Johnson's are recommended by their Pentax "endorsement".

Thanks all.

Good point!

Maybe I mis-understood the lens/aperture operation. That assertion sounded good when I heard/read it.

When I took some cyclo-cross pics a fortnight ago, I used AF-C and let the camera (K10D) select the AF point.

I used an FA28-90 which performed poorly but my DA 50-200 performed better. Don't know if it was due to (relatively) shallower DOF at longer focal lengths. Despite the results I would like to give it another go soon.

It might be worth trying wider apertures next time, to throw the background more out-of-focus and emphasize the riders and also to enable faster shutter speeds. As a general point, wide apertures should help the AF too.

Regards

Steve, did you use a petal hood for this shot?

Or someone taking the pis-til!

Don't worry Gwyn, I don't even know, what are sidecar files?

When I shoot PEF as my RAW format, are they the .spi and .spd files created when I start to tweak the originals in Silkypix (Developer Studio 3.0 Free Edition)?

I take it you weren't driving?

That's a shocking admission - worse than using a mobile phone!

But how many keepers?

I have just downloaded Adobe DNG Converter 6.3 and ran it on 33 DNG files shot in 2009 with my K10D (apart from this one shoot, I have always used PEFs due to the smaller file size).

For originals ranging from 16,853,617 to 17,126,478 (average 16,999,259), the converted files ranged from 7,015,640 to 10,185,090 (average 8,852,933).

The 'converted' files ranged from 41.3% to 59.7% of the size of the originals (average 52.1%).

I suppose the next thing to try is to convert the conversions. If there was another significant size reduction, then I might begin to suspect some lossy compression.

Regards,