Just in Case Someone Else Has This Problem

 My Pentax KS-1 started misbehaving this morning.  I turned it on and in Auto mode and in the viewfinder all that came up was F--.  No other data was visible.  It was specific to the Pentax 100-300mm lens; all other lens worked fine.  I rubbed the contacts on lens and camera body since it seemed to not be talking to the lens.  It was actually that I had somehow turned the aperture lens to one of the manual settings instead of A (for auto).  The camera was asking for lens aperture and getting no sensible answer.  Setting the ring to A and all is well.  I am glad that I did not go into Idaho Camera for this.

Overexposed Picture Repair

I believe that I mentioned failing to change the ISO setting from 1600 back to 100 after doing aurora pictures, before moving to the brightly bird sanctuary.  This produced pictures that look like the birds are living in a nuclear test area.

I used Auto Adjust Colors in IrfanView (the most amazingly useful free imaging software next to GIMP, and for many purposes faster and easier to use than GIMP):

Unfortunately, only some could be salvaged.  The ones perilously close to "white cow eating marshmallows in a snow storm" were impossible.

Florida Wildlife

We found these in an industrial park in Fort Pierce:

 

Alligators

I really wanted to see one in the wild, having had a pet alligator many years ago.

UPDATE: My pet alligator.  Many years ago, my sister Susan went on vacation to Florida to visit her first husband's family.  While there, she went to an alligator farm, and bought two baby alligators.  On the way back, she was sleeping in the car, and felt something brush against her foot, followed by a chomp from one of the adorable creatures.  Anyway, she gave me one of them.  It was about 14 inches long.  Alligators apparently only eat live prey.  Mine ate one gold fish, but only played with the others, and eventually starved, so I buried him in the back yard at 1541 Berkeley St. in Santa Monica, where some future paleontologist is going to get very confused.