Originally Posted by Blake Reverb
AHHHHH so yeah, it was the SD. thanks mate
Glad that suggestion worked. The other possibilities were more worrisome.
By the way, if I were you, I would simply reformat the defective SD card and then take a dozen test photos with it to see if it can be rescued. It might just have been badly formatted. Remember that you should always
format the card in the camera, using the camera's format card command. Click the Menu button, go to Tools. Do not simply erase images on the card when it's mounted on your computer.
althou i still learning the camera, so not so shure how to avoid noise nd stuff
ill learn thou. is there any online pentax tutorials or sutmhin. thanks again
Well, this sounds a bit like "How do I learn about photography?" A great question, but as you can imagine, a big one.
To learn about the camera itself, you might consider buying the Magic Lantern series book on this camera. It's a big improvement on the operating manual -- although if you throw yourself at it often enough, you can learn a lot from the operating manual.
Basic theory: To avoid noise, keep the ISO low. Your camera goes only to ISO 200, if I recall correctly, so try to keep it at 200 or 400. On the other hand, some will tell you not to worry about the ISO too much, and that's a fair bit of advice, too. Even at 800, photos from this camera aren't too noisy.
My main advice to you would be three-fold and largely negative:
- Forget completely about the canned shooting modes
- Forget about Auto
- Forget even about P as much as possible
The sooner you take that advice to heart, the sooner you'll start to learn how to use your wonderful camera.
The best thing you can do is put it in M mode and practice there. Learn how to read the camera's meter so you can change the settings to get a correct exposure, and take a lot of pictures. Remember, this is digital, so you can sit in your living room and take photos of nothing in particular, look at 'em on the LCD, then erase 'em. M mode is much easier than most people think, because after all, the main thing that's manual is that you're turning the dials; you are, normally, going to take the camera's advice about exposure. You will soon learn when to change what the camera recommends but that's easy too.
But if you find M too scary to start with, or if you are actually out taking shots that you'd like to keep and you don't feel quite up to thinking real hard, then learn Tv and Av mode. Basic concepts here:
Use Tv (shutter priority) mode when you know what shutter speed you want; and let the camera figure out the right aperture for you. Example: You're shooting sports and you know you want to keep the shutter speed at something like 1/350th sec. Set camera to Tv, set shutter speed to 1/350th sec, and let the camera do the rest. Contrariwise, if you're shooting with the flash indoors and you want to let more ambient light into the photo, set the shutter to something slow like 1/20th sec, take your photo.
Use Av (aperture priority) mode to control the aperture. Aperture is your main/easiest tool for controlling depth of field. Want lots of depth of field? Use a small aperture like f/11 or something higher (f/16, if you've got the light). Want to narrow the depth of field, say, for a portrait? Use a big aperture like f/2.8 or as close to it as you can get. Start by getting used to the extremes and then you'll begin to work on subtle adjustments.
And get a book on photography. There are tons and tons and tons. A few of them are actually pretty good. Bryan Peterson's
Exposure is often recommended, but I also like Chris Weston's book of the same name, which contains a lot of the same info and then some, and uses a much simpler format (one topic per page). Peterson's book is more inspirational; Weston's book is less exciting but more informative. Be aware that the principles involved are the same pretty much for every camera ever made.
Good luck,
Will