SMC Takumar 135mm average 31 quid. The cheapest I have on the database went for 24 quid.

Hopefully one of you kind souls will allow me to leave my crash helmet and bike gear in your boot while we are out taking photos. Bad enough carting camera equipment about but the rest of the stuff will be a pain. Not sure if the other half will want to come (she'll be over from the US), in which case we may have to look into trains etc.

Cheers, Kris.

The lack of anything longer than 300mm in the current line-up probably contributes the the high value of the 400mm. Post-M series lenses certainly command higher prices, and unsurprisingly primes do better than zooms. I'd really like a 85mm lens one day, but not at that price!

The monocular converter is the only one I have ever seen for sale.

I was doing a magnetometry survey today on a small site in Herts so just took the K10D with the 43mm Ltd. There is a herd of deer living near the site including one albino. I had forgotten about them and I wished I had the 70-300mm zoom instead when I found them grazing in the middle of the field... Ah well. Next week.

Could you let me have the listing number for that one? I cannot get it to come up on a "completed listings" search. I want to add it to the database!

Thanks, Kris.

Nice looking bags but I wish someone had shown the model how to hold a camera

SMC-A 400mm f/5.6 £436.01
SMC-FA* 24mm F2 AL [IF] £365.00
SMC-FA* 85mm F1.4 c. £900
SMC-M 100mm f/2.8 £94.12
SMC Pentax M Monocular converter K £139.22
Super Takumar 105mm f/2.8 £73.37

Credit crunch? What credit crunch...

Personally I'd leave the pro to do the endless boring group photos of the bride and her aunt and go around taking the candid shots of people having fun. It also gives you the freedom to look for unusual angles and shots that the pro will miss getting the standard suite of dull pictures of the bride arriving and all that. If you get some great shots, you'll gain some kudos. If nothing quite works, say you used the free bar too much!

I find this bag mallarky a real problem. I have one shoulder bag type bag which I like as I can get to everything quickly, but at the end of a long day I have a very stiff shoulder. I also have a Lowerpro backpack which means I can carry lots of stuff (including my laptop) but when I want to take a picture I have to find a bench or something to put the bag down on to get the gear out. Even then I have to be careful as the way the zip undoes it is easy to dump the camera on the floor. I then have a padded bag that just takes the camera and whatever lens is fitted on it. OK, as long as I choose the right lens... Add to that my inbuilt natural tendency to pack everything including the kitchen sink, every trip out the door involves agonising over which bodies/lenses/filters/flashes to take. Aggghhhh...

The UV idea is floating around there in webworld but I have found a couple of microbiologists who state that you need UV-C to kill fungus, and sadly glass absorbs most UV-C. Taking it apart and cleaning it seems the way to go. Anyone have a diagram of the inside of a FC-1?