I have been offered $75 for the use of my picture: should I take it?

I have the Sigma 18-250, it has it's limitations as any lens with this range does, but I am pretty happy with it and use it often. It's built like a tank, AF is as good as any lens I have, and some of it's faults can be corrected in Lightroom or ACR using the lens correction profiles. I have had some excellent A3 prints from it. It does need to be stopped down though, especially at its longer end. At arond 135m mm f11 seems to give the best results, though at 250mm f8 is fine. At 18mm I think it's better than the kit lens, at all apertures. I also like the optical stabilisation, especially at its longest, when it gives you a steady image in the viewfinder, which the in-camera SR does not. Just remember to switch off SR if you use the OS in the lens. Don't be tempted by the Sigma 18-200, it's nowhere near as good as the 18-250.

I don't have any experience of the Pentax version, so can't give a comparison image wise.

Great shots, i especially like 5 and 6

That is a stunning shot!

Yorkshire cameras website appears to have been taken down now.

I use the Sigma 10-20 quite a lot for landscapes. If the distortion bothers you it can easily be corrected.

True,but the anyone asking a friend to do their wedding is still taking the chance that they may not get the results they would get from a professional, unless of course their friend is a professional. I actually had my wedding photgraphed for free by a friend, who is a professional, but only because he refused to accept payment and said it was his wedding gift. And what a fantastic gift it was!

With Flickr, the images are already there and can be chosen based on what the organisation is looking for, just by searching tags. Flickr now looks like it is becoming a massive free stock agency, which is a bit different to people being asked to do a single wedding for nothing. I imagine AMEX is getting a lot of images for free that it is putting to commercial use, which is a bit different from a wedding album that is a keepsake for the client and not a commercial enterprise. It could seriously impact sales from stock agencies.

Well done!

I have still not heard back after sending them a quote of 500 dollars for unlimited use of my photograph, which does not really surprise me. I did write them a polite email saying I was not prepared to let them use my image without payment and pointing out that what I was quoting was below industry standards (this accorfing to the link Simon posted) for the proposed use. I am wondering of I should have stuck to my original idea of 250 dollars, though I am pretty certain it would have received the same response, ie none.

I also do not see the point of quoting a totally ridiculous figure, there was always the off-chance they would pay me for the image, and I would rather the slight chance the offer was accepted than the certainty that it would be looked on as totally ridiculous. I feel I have behaved in a professional manner even though they haven't, and if making a point is all I achieve from this, I have made a far more effective one than I would by being totally unrealistic with a quote.

I wonder how many other organizations are using this same method to get free advertising material? It does not bode well for people who make their living out of photography. Thete are now 6 billion images on Flickr, a huge potential source of free images for unscrupulous organizations to obtain free images by basically appealing to peoples vanity. I am going to write to a magazine about it, and would welcome suggestions as to which publication would be read by the most amateurs, as it is the amateurs that are being targeted with this type of approach.

Looking at their website, there's a lot of pics on here that judging by the email they sent me, they porobably haven't paid for, so I will be very surprised if they even reply!