OK. Time to 'fess up. Who bought it?

I have a big pile of primes. All cost me less than £100 on ebay and give lovely results. Try attaching a 35 year old Canon lens to a modern Canon camera... In fact, there is a substantial group of people attaching Takumar M42 lenses to Canon cameras.

K.

I would blame Microsoft not Pentax for those, although I admit they are puzzling!

I still have a box of punched cards in my office...

I think Martin and I were thinking much the same thoughts at much the same time!

K.

So you only ever shot slide film and never had them printed? As soon as you print a neg (or a slide) what do you do? Make a test strip to determine exposure, decide on the grade/type of paper you are going to use or dial in the appropriate filter for multigrade etc. Did you always have the easel exactly square with the head of the enlarger? Did you never zoom in a little bit to crop out some extraneous bits?

"Post processing" is a rather broad catch all term which goes from the sort of things you would do in a darkroom which are always necessary to get a good final print, to the way out art filters and graphic design tools. One has to be careful about throwing the baby out with the bathwater here.

Best wishes, Kris.

Gwyn is quite right, the NT is a charity and is not state owned nor does it receive state sponsorship.

I really cannot see what the fuss is about. For your own use, you can take photographs. For sale to make a profit, they make a charge. If the NT didn't maximise their income, many of our "national treasures" would be housing developments or golf courses and their contents gracing the homes of rich collectors.

K.

You sure its not a BBC minicomputer?

Still not a bad price for that lens, even with the postage. I'd be tempted had it not been for last weeks little splurge.

K.

Most museums around the world will charge for any type of photography, the UK is generally the exception. I had to pay to take photographs of motorcycles in a small exhibition in Bucharest last summer.

As to cost, have you any idea how much it costs to maintain some of these big properties? I agree the saga of the plays seems short-sighted, but upkeep of these places can be enormous. Someone said the NT were given them, and yes they were but they had to come with an endowment for maintenance so that the NT wouldn't go bankrupt. In the late 40s and early 50s large numbers of historic stately homes (including the one which used to exist where I live) were demolished because the owners could neither afford the new inheritance tax or to give them to the NT. It is not as though the entrance fee (or the photography fee) goes into shareholder's pockets. I, for one, am glad that someone is trying to prevent the entirety of the UK turning into nothing more than a mixture of urb-less suburbs and golf-courses.

K.