I bought a K10D in May after 2 years of hard saving and am really pleased with it - I dont have very much in the way of spare funds so I stuck with the kit DA18 -55 lens and bought a cheaper sigma 80-200 (around £85)to go with it. I keep the lenes in the camera bag with some little bags of silica gell to ensure they stay dry and clean but allready the kit lens has quite a large speck of dirt which looks like a very small fleck of black paint inside it about 1/2 mm dia and the sigma has what looks like a very small hair/fibre inside about 1mm. Its just suprising as I have bought some older pentax lenses cheaply via ebay e.g. M28,f2.8, M50,F2 K55,F1.8 and an F80 -200 zoom and although they are much older they appear a lot cleaner and the manual focus ones certainly feel like they are better quality if that makes sense. has anyone else experienced this kind of thing with the newer lenses?

I bought the triggers from a uk seller on ebay i will try a find a link for you

ta for the tip on the 500ftz and the link to the manual i will look out for one

Hi All

After the very helpful advice I was given on a previous thread I bought some cheap radio triggers from e-bay which work well for £14 incl postage!!

My only problem is that I have a National PE 3057 flashgun which has a single centre pin and has a good number of manual settings, plus it has a safe trigger voltage - it works fine on the camera but will not work with the triggers. This is a shame as its a lovely flashgun with some good features - I wonder if the wireless triggers dont have enough power to trigger this gun? My other flashgun is a Pentax AF260SA - this works 100% with the triggers but I have no instructions for it and it appears to have no manual settings.

Can anyone recommend a good pentax or other flashgun with some manual settings that i can "play with" off the camera with the wireless triggers - my main aim is to learn about the various effects of flash at differant angles, powers etc without spending a fourtune.

many thanks

will

Thanks for confirming I am on the right lines

cheers

will

Thanks for the advice on this - I am up and running with it now

HI all

I have been using my K10D for a while and would like to experiment with some flash photography, lighting effects etc - I cannot afford the recommended P-TTL units at the moment but I have done some reading on the subject and was interested in using an old flash of the cheap e-bay variety, off camera -providing the trigger voltage not too high. Am i right in thinking i can get one of the pc sync cable hot shoe adaptors off e-bay for a few pounds - the type that fit to the camera hot shoe and allow the connection of an older style pc cable which can then be connected to a flash and use it in manual mode? I am quite happy working in manual mode on the camera as I have some older M lenses that i like to use anyway.

This seems like a good cheap alternative as i could get a flash gun for around £10 and about 15 for the adaptor and lead the only thing is I need to check the flash has a pc cable input and has manual settings for iso etc?

as far as i can see all i need is

Flash with reasonable trigger voltage, manual settings and pc cable input
pc hotshoe adaptor
pc cable

Then of cours the stands, softboxes, home made studio etc etc as i get more in to it!!

Am I along the right lines here or way off the mark? and is it possible to get a pc adaptor for a flash without a pc cable socket?

thanks in advance

will

ok thanks - i downloaded the free version of silkypix and it does indeed look nice and simple to use with a good interface design - i would like to learn to use photoshop as its on my laptop doing nothing and during dinner hours at work i can then spend some time experementing with these programs.

I see there in an option in the pentax software to save as both tiff 8 & 16 bit so i will try both.

thanks

will

Thanks John

reading previous posts i take it that TIFF is preferable? as you dont loose anything or is jpeg also fine?

thanks

will

Hi All

My works laptop has adobe photoshop 7 installed so i thought i would edit some .pef files however photoshop7 does not recognise them, i tried the .dng format but this is also not supported and there are no updates on the adobe site for .dng or raw with version 7 only cs or above. I have downloaded the free version of silkypix but cannot see how to convert the .pef to .raw for use in photoshop. the photoshop menu does list the .raw format as a filetype so I am a little lost as to what to try next, i could convert to jpeg but i understand some quality may be lost.

so any suggestions on how to converst the .dng or .pef to work in photoshop 7? it seems a shame to let the software go unused and the works library has lots of books on this version of photoshop too

thanks

will

Just to say thanks to SRS Micro for super fast delivery & service