Could you please provide a link or source for this?

Thanks.

That hurts

Thanks Hefty.
That is certainly true, but it is not my only gripe with the manual. From my own experience one of the advantages of the aforementioned book is that it prompted me to delve back into the manual – originally examined and discarded after probably less than 20 minutes of perplexed perusal – to discover how I went about performing various functions with newfound clarity of purpose.

This most recent experience confirmed my initial impression; the manual is without doubt one of the best examples I have seen of the ceaseless march towards the triumph of techno-babble over plain language, common sense explanation.

For example the section on autofocus caught my eye; to paraphrase, in AF.S you press the shutter down halfway until focus is locked whereas in AF.C you press the shutter down halfway whereafter focus becomes continuous.

To my ear locked and continuous are close synonyms, but rather than expounding on this apparently highly subtle difference the same words are instead immediately repeated almost verbatim in an important looking table, as if this information alone rivalled Einstein’s theory of relativity in imparting penetrating insight.

Not until the end of the section - and contained within a block of densely typed small print – is a difference in the treatment of moving subjects alluded to, but even this is IMO woefully inadequate.

However, it gets worse in the section on the AE-L button; “AE Lock is a function that memorizes the exposure prior to taking the picture. Use this. . . .when a proper exposure cannot be obtained.”

Hmmm: The button is used to memorize improper exposure settings. I think it is fair to say it would never have occurred to me to meter light anywhere else than the scene I was framing in a month of Sundays, and thanks to Pentax’s description of this seemingly inexplicably useless function button I would have remained in blissful ignorance of that possibility had it not been for the Peters book.

I can only conclude that the Pentax manual has been produced by honourable former samurai so disenchanted by their departure from the way of the warrior, they have elected to commit ritual career suicide by preparing documentation of such mind-numbingly banal uselessness that nobody new to this stuff is ever going to make sense of the camera, thus ensuring their customer base will eventually disappear into the void via natural attrition.

Hello everyone,

This is my first post here. I have nevertheless been lurking for some time soaking up information, but saw your message which encouraged me to register and share my own experience since we are somewhat in the same boat.

Shortly after Christmas I bought a Pentax K10D as an upgrade to a Canon S3 I had had for a little over a year and used in fully automatic mode pretty much all the time. I bought the K10D specifically because I was very disappointed with my S3’s performance in low light over Christmas, missing no end of opportunities to snap my now 10 month old daughter (until recently the near exclusive object of my fledgling photography).

I was aware this situation would not necessarily improve with the Pentax kit lens and sure enough quickly splashed out on a faster Tamron 28-75mm F2.8 lens, armed only with a basic understanding I needed to get more light into the camera sensor. No regrets about that purchase whatsoever though.

However, except for the occasional invariably blurry experiment I continued to keep the camera in fully automatic mode, although my hit rate of acceptably focused shots did increase dramatically.

Unfortunately my understanding of the camera basics did not follow suit and, with a seemingly bewildering number of possible permutations of aperture, shutter speed and ISO, did not want to risk failing to capture precious moments by manually messing up any settings.

Fortunately, while trawling Amazon for possible equipment purchases a couple of months ago, I came across a book called “Understanding Exposure” by Bryan Peters ( http://tinyurl.com/58gvv7 ), which caught my eye coming highly recommended by a large number of people. I quickly snapped up a copy; what a stroke of good fortune and what a revelation.

I had for some time realised that aperture, shutter speed and ISO where somehow related, but did not appreciate precisely how. From my perspective the genius of this book is that it provides simple rules of thumb for correct exposure settings in different types of scene. These are so simple I could reel them off from the top of my head but I would strongly recommend you get the illustrated book to get a feel for the end product of the techniques described.

Of course there is no substitute for experience in any field, but I have no doubt that reading this book is an excellent way of drastically reducing your photographic margin of error.

Alas it will not cure you of LBA, but I am confident it will help you to more critically evaluate what you already have and make better future purchase decisions.