Grr. They're back.

Woo!! Blue is back.

And the ads are gone too.

Fantastic. I can turn the brightness on my monitor back up now...

Just to add another voice:

Please give us subSilver back

Indeed, John, and you have three out of three.

Ooh, I think I'm getting great-great-grandad coming through... (best in a Yorkshire accent, I think)

"... aye, lad, you don't know your born with your twelve shots per roll - a roll now, ain't that fancy... when I were a weddin photographer, we 'ad to get em to stand still for a minute or more, and the time it took to get that plate out every time... and ee that camera were right 'eavy.... Still, I ad a lad called Pete I think 'is name was, to do the cartin' and shiftin'..."

I think you need it available.

Resolving the fine mesh in the net in the bride's dress, and the detail in the sapphire pendant that matches her eyes so well that her granny gave her before she passed on, is highly desirable, even if you blur her mum's mole a bit (pace, George).

There's a grain of truth in this, admittedly.

But to sell yourself to someone else on the strength of the photos you've taken at the wedding of some random person they don't know at all is another matter entirely.

There's no "aww there's Auntie Dorrie, and little Eric, my how he's grown" factor.

Instead there are a lot of tech-savvy people who probably have a digital camera, and they're about to lash out a grand or more on someone that's got to make them look great.

I suspect people are more sensitive than you might think to the quality of the shots in the portfolio if they have no emotional attachment to them.

Well, I've just been through the 250 shots I took at a friends wedding recently that were good enough to give him on a CD. Very few of them were the sort of shots that would end up in a traditional wedding album.

I'd classify them in the "sharp snaps with people looking from Ok to good" category - not the sort of thing I'd charge money for, or enlarge much above 7x5, with a smallish handful of exceptions, but I don't let anyone see any of my substantial number of rubbish shots, much less give copies of them away, even to friends.

Of the 250, 75 were above 140 mm (isn't EXIF wonderful), and about half of those were right out at 200mm.

The reception was in the gardens of a lovely country mansion, so people were pretty spread out apart from the eating bit. And I was a fair way away from the speeches, so I used 200mm for the close ups of the speakers (of which, IMHO, a couple were better than the pro's, which I've now seen). Thank heavens for SR, I say.

It's the charging thing, really. A long zoom is hugely useful for candids, and if Pete is running around as a tog's assistant getting them, in the hope that there will be a few good ones, then I can see the appeal.

For the pukka thing, though, as the official photographer, I think such a scheme would be pretty ill-conceived.

Of course, but although this is very sound advice, it seems to be solving a slightly different problem from the one Pete is concerned with at the moment.

He's an assistant at the moment, not the main man, so body failure is less of an issue just now.

Swapping to the other camera when you have only a moment to catch a candid isn't much more practical than changing lenses, since you'd have to have them both round your neck, so I can see the appeal of a "do-all" lens during the reception perhaps, when ultimate image quality is less important than some of the moments that you only have an instant to catch.

Just noticed this thread over at PentaxForums.com, Pete.

http://tinyurl.com/2mre23

Not sure if the pictures there really prove much, since (quite apart from anything else), none of them are at the extremes of the zoom range (one is at 23mm, though, to be fair).

But if you're still thinking seriously about the Tamron 18-250 you mentioned, it might be worth following for a bit to see if anyone posts anything that gives a clue as to its actual image quality in the context you want it for.