I find it paradoxical that the UK is the most highly watched nation in the Western World, with a nearly 5 million CCTV cameras (leading to what some commentators have refered to as a "surveillance society"), yet many people appear to have a problem with photographers taking photographs in public places. Most domestic violence and child abuse is carried out within family units and not by strangers. It makes no sense at all to have a go at photographers.

I was recently taking some still life photographs on a remote beach in Norfolk - pictures of junk that had been washed up. I was followed by a very intimidating chap all the way along the beach - and I can only think it was because I was obviously taking photgraphs. It put a dampener on the day, because I take photographs to exercise my creativity and get away from the boring day to day life. Maybe I should take up drawing - people seem to crowd round artists painting beach scenes...

Further update:

I put my old AF160 flash onto the hotshoe of my K-M and low and behold, the internal flash pops up and fires OK when I press the little button on the side...

So I looked a little bit closer at the pop-up flash mechanism (after tying a temporary bit of fishing line around the catch so I can open and close it manually) - note just looking, not taking anything apart!!!!

There's a small plastic pin on the hotshoe that depresses when an external flash is put on the camera. I guess this tells the camera NOT to pop up the internal flash. There's also another pin that is pressed down by the pop-up flash which I guess tells the camera when the pop-up flash is down.

So, by some logical deduction, I guess that the switch that tells the camera that an external flash is on the hotshoe is broken, because internal flash pops up when the hotshoe flash is on. Could be gunged up with dust or just plain rusty

It looks to me like it would be easy for a tiny raindrop to just roll down the tiny hole housing the hotshoe pin into the switch - so it might be worth other owners keeping an eye out for this possibility.

This is all academic really - it is obviously faulty and will have to be fixed, but nice to work out what's happening...in the meanwhile, I can go low tech with my robust fishing line manual pop-up solution

Thanks for all your help!

Sounds definitely like a fault - I've emailed Pentax support and will update the forum when they get back to me.

Luckily, I don't do all that much flash stuff, but still, would be nice if things worked as they should

Apart from this glitch, I've been really impressed with my little k-m - I've moved up from a film P30N which in my humble opinion is a fantastic film camera - metal shutter, tough as old boots and really, really nice to use (a undiscovered gem for traditional manual photography).

Hi
Either I'm doing something daft, or my shiny k-m has a fault.
I am in AV mode, with flash set to on, I press the little flash button and the flash doesn't pop up (well - it has popped up once since I've had camera and flashed OK). In the viewfinder, the flash icon just sits there blinking at me.
Am I missing something or is the flash faulty?
Any help/advice welcome!