Another Zenit B owner in the early 70s... traded in for an Olympus OM10 mid 70s...

Digging through old slides and scanning them reminded me how much I enjoyed photography, so I decided to treat myself to a Digital SLR last year. Budget £400-ish...

Then began the online research. The in-camera IS. The K-r twin zoom lens kit at reasonable cost. The ability to use old lenses (my Soligor 350mm with T2-K adapter). The odds stacked more and more in Pentax favour. Coupled with a 'good name' from the past. Once I'd handled one it was a 'no brainer' and I've been very pleased.

I just need to stop surfing and go out snapping more!

Seems if you want a K-r you'll need to decide quickly... I got my K-r and twin lens kit last year from Currys as it was the best price and only fairly local-to-me store to have one in stock to try for handling. Never expected it to be discontinued quite so soon!!

Currys / PC World still have them in some stores - but they may be the store demo ones! (Buy and collect via a Cashback site will 'save' a few more ££s). Memory card(s) from Amazon or somewhere sensibly priced, of course!

I'm well pleased with my K-r - my first SLR since the '70s OM10, but you do need to handle one to be sure it is for you.

I've been using my Canon MP980 all-in-one to digitise/copy photos, 35mm slides and negatives with remarkably satisfying, to me anyway, results.

For the slide/negatives you do need high resolutions to get usable results. The Canon has optical 4800x9600 dpi max and is (IMO) just ok at 2400x2400 but much better at 4800x4800. Taking 24bit TIFFs of slides at that resolution gives me 80MB raw files to work with in post-processing.

Prints are much easier to scan, as lower resolutions will be fine.

The biggest problem is all the dust on the originals

I've just tried this out on my K-r and the 18-55 in Manual focus.

In Live View if you press the INFO button it magnifies the displayed image (each press magnifies closer and closer). You can adjust where the magnified portion is via the arrow keys around the OK button.

MENU resets to full view.

It does allow accurate focus on a selected part of the scene.

Rule of thumb: whichever lens is currently fixed to the body is not the one you need to frame the shot how you want to.

The 50-200 zoom is likely to be more useful in taking close-up portrait shots, wildlife and things far away from you.

The 18-55 is most likely to be used in taking shots of landscapes, outsides of buildings, inside rooms and 'groups of people' shots.

Either lens can be used for anything... try the 18mm setting to take a close-up of someone's face (it's unlikely to be a flattering photo, but do try it!).

UFRAW doesn't fully support my K-r so I use the Pentax utility to develop and then go on to Gimp as necessary.

It shouldn't matter too much - as long as the colour chosen is not present in the object(s) in the foreground. Even lighting of the background is needed, with no shadows onto the background (ideally) nor spill back of colour onto the object(s). You'll 'pick' the colour to make transparent and can expand its range until all the background disappears.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chroma_key is worth a read.

A quick look shows that E-bay and Amazon have blue and green screens for sale, and a good photo shop may also have some. I think you can even buy special paints from specialist suppliers (stage & TV lighting?).

It's a design feature of Vista and 7.

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_7-files/windows-explore...

You can tell Micro$oft you miss it - but will they change it back?

Is that all? With an audience of 6.44 million (14 Aug 2011) I'd have expected more.

Many congratulations... you deserve to feel very, very chuffed... just imagine over 6 Million people looking at your picture on the TV in a couple of weeks!!

No login boxes on Chrome via TalkTalk on Vista from here, just straight to the information. An odd one. Try clearing your cookies for that site?