I honestly don't know how well this will show the lens quality, as there seems to be some motion blur or the focus is otherwise not quite right. (camera was on a tripod with 2 second timer for mirror lockup)

Anyway, the 300mm with the Pentax is completely different than with the Tamron. With the lens at 300mm with the Tamron is only 180-200mm on the Pentax. So the Pentax gets much closer to the subject. Again, how do you truly compare the two lenses when they do not even match focal length closely.

Another thing to notice is the Pentax gives a more color accurate image, the Tamron lens is rather yellow.

Anyway, I cropped the images to be about the same size. The images are not 100% pixel, so take it for what its worth...

Tamron @300mm cropped



Pentax @30 cropped



Tamron @300 full image



Pentax @300 full image

Ugh! Wasn't another thread just talking about using the spell checker? Too bad Firefox doesn't just know want I want to say an correct it.

Lens Rage: what occurs if you're not allowed to satisfy your LBA!

Anyway, I bought the lens at a local shop here. (The only one in fifty miles). They really know their stuff and have great prices.

Just picked one up for $350. About the same cost as my Tamron 28-300 six years or more ago. Initial subjective tests indicate the quality is far superior. I'll have to do some more qualitative tests later.
It is obviously soft at the far end, of course I'm not sure that is anything but expected for the rage and price of this lens.

That is another one of those questions with an answer that varies a lot on what you're doing.

But generally I follow the controls from the top down. SilkyPix is pretty well laid out in that way, as I guess, other such tools generally are.

Exposure, white balance are the biggies of course.
I almost always add a bit of contrast and sharpening and have set those as defaults.

Wish I could add more than "Good luck".
I have calibrated/profiled monitors, printer with profile matching the paper used, correct inks, and software correctly configured to use the printer and its profiles, etc... yet I still get vastly off-color prints.

I honestly disbelieve anyone who says that have this stuff working properly. They probably believe the King's new clothes are superb as well.


I am sure I am doing something wrong, but everything is configured as suggested by various books and people helping to set it up correctly.
It has also recently been suggested that I might need to re-install the printer drivers. Otherwise the printer may be bad, but good luck on servicing that for much less than the cost of a new one. Argh!!

Devil's Advocate:
Use jpeg if it works for ya. Its faster and smaller and takes less of your time. But you need to be spot on with exposure and white balance to begin with.

On the RAW side:
Processing RAW doesn't take that long, especially compared to the time it takes to "fix" jpegs. Disk space is cheap. Processing RAW generally gives a better final jpeg image than the camera's default modes.

Try JPG+RAW for a while. After a few months of shooting both, I now shoot RAW only. I find I don't need PhotoShop for most of my images any more... SilkyPix does at least 80%-90% of the work I ever need to do onmost of my photos.

I believe the trailing flash on K10D is only available with an external flash like the 360 or 540, and probably the Sigma's etc...

Not sure why it would be flashing twice (other than metering PTTL type flashes) unless you have the timer set.

If you shoot RAW you'll have a pretty good latitude for white balance correction within a RAW converter.
If you only have JPEG, you can do a lot using curves in PhotoShop or similar (forget the name in Paint Shop pro), but if the colors are far out of whack you may start to lose more color depth than you'd like.

Of course, setting the manual white balance in camera will take away that extra effort of fixing each photo, and assign it up front as each photo is taken.
Best to look it up in the manual... without my camera in front of me, I'm likely to give you the wrong instructions.
Since the subjects have white uniforms, I used to have one stand with their back to me. Or you could use a sheet of paper, but I didn't always have a clean one handy.

DOF? 50mm, f1.4 at lets say two meters has a DOF of about 10cm. Probably not too bad, but you do have to take care when you have more than one person in the shot. That isn't a lot of room if they're not both parallel to the camera.
A great site for helping with DOF calculations: http://www.dofmaster.com/

If your comfortable with the "limitations" of 50mm prime (as opposed to a zoom), you may find it liberating as far as shutter speed is concerned. But at f1.4, you are going to lose even more DOF, so it may not be all its cracked up to be. For subjects tat don't move too fast towards or away from me, (Pentax may not autofocus like a rocket, but its better than I can do manually), I love the lens.

I like the photos you posted. Just a tad bit of motion blur for effect, but the faces still appear in focus.

I guess I would see about working the white balance a little bit more. The yellow is a bit much.

I think the two closer up shots most. Nice expression on the B&W, especially.

Yeah, see the guy at the bottom with the goofy face? Look up and to the right over his left shoulder. The poor guy with his head down and empty monopod. Burst rate too slow, no adequate lenses, and the damn shutter is too noisy! He just put is equipment away.