How awful for you. Development is a Catch 22, the more it spreads the more transport is needed to get about: housing here is dreadfully inefficient with 70% of the land going to car use space but nothing is being done to address that, developers just given carte blanche to gobble up farmland and countryside.

I am with you on the 77mm Limited but I understand it is not as sharp around the edges and can get chromatic aberration; both of these were understood by the designers but as it is designed as a portrait lens then they would have no detrimental effect, it’s other design features being a priority. Also of course it does not have an in-built motor.

I am no techie but guessing several reasons: lenses need to incorporate electronic motors to drive focus, to help edge to edge sharpness, to facilitate wider f-stops like f1.4. Another reason could be that lenses need to match the performance of high pixel count sensors.

And here's another one!

The village festival today included a vintage car rally so here is a selection of snaps; the problem with a show like this is the distracting and unsympathetic setting, with people milling about, other cars and houses in the background etc. so for the car shots I decided to mask out everything except the subject.










and finally:

Thanks for the NPG link, some interesting stuff there, tempting!

Nice, Gareth! A grand is pretty steep but I hope you got a fair price. What does your mobile studio consist of?

A beautiful set, great use of light and rain!

Further to John Riley’s comment I wonder why you are getting rid of some really nice lightweight primes and keeping the heavier zooms? I have experimented with going out with just a 50mm prime for a coast walk and it surprised me how versatile it was; similarly I used just the 77mm for a photo shoot and the results were all I could wish for, whilst an equally fast zoom would be far heavier.

As for a long supertelephoto I tried one once on a top end Panasonic and the combination was quite unbalanced: all the weight of the lens was carried by the left hand as the camera had insufficient grip, which meant zooming was quite awkward. There is a lot to be said for trying out stuff first.

Given that you are keeping your favoured Pentax kit it makes absolute sense to try a different system. I have a basic M4/3 Leica as a walk around and although the files don’t come close to the K1 for resolution and dynamic range it is ok and despite annoying foibles is much easier to use than a camera phone. I have long toyed with the idea of upgrading it to something more serious like a Fuji; not a bigger Leica though because apart from the cost they have the annoying habit of not labelling buttons which, being programmable, I can never remember what they do. Only when you have used a system for some time do you appreciate how photographer-friendly Pentax are.