My wife would like a new portrait lens with quickshift. She says she is happy with what she sees through the viewfinder of her K5 with her 50mm Pentax-A she just wants to have auto focus and WR. Now after reading recent posts about focal length I'm confused

So my question is this, what lens should I buy her considering

* She likes the K5 & Pentax-A 50mm distance from subject / fov
* She wants quickshift
* She wants WR
* I would like it to be FF compatible if it can but this isn't too important!

Thanks for the advice!

PS: I need to buy her a lens before my new Pentax DA* 300mm gets here (or before she finds out anyway lol)!

I had one for a k10d and it was great! Helped a lot with manual focus lenses.

I have the Martin Evening book and it is very good

I will only be using it for back up not viewing so I don't see it as that much of a problem if it is slow or not ... Unless I need to run out the door right after the files are imported to LR3. I understand the Pi is going to be slower than a pro grade NAS but then again the Pi cost me £35 and I already have the external HDD.

My main problem with backups is getting around to attaching the drive to back up onto it (it sits under the tv most of the time), but by having the Pi and HDD on all the time as a NAS I will be far more likely to back up to them. And in the end if I get the new files trickling over to the remote Pi and HDD then I will be quite happy I think (not in any rush after all as I'm just an amateur).

I plan on doing the following in the coming months.
 
I recently bought a Raspberry Pi and am going to attach it to an external hard drive to make it into a cheap NAS (Network Attached Storage)  device using a Linux program called SAMBA. When this is done I will run the backup section of Lightroom every time the application closes so that it saves the files to the NAS.
 
I would also like to eventually get another Raspberry Pi & external hard drive and place them off-site (at my mother or brothers house depending on ISP download limits). I will then develop an application to transfer new photos to the offsite location (after all what good is a backup being in the same house as my laptop if there is a fire it would destroy both!) at a pre-specified transfer speed cap (to stop it hogging all the bandwidth) and allow internet users at the backup location to temporarily decrease / stop the transfer if they want to use the internet at full speed.
 
In the end I hope to also run a web server from the Raspberry Pi at my own house to allow me to view photos from the collection remotely. However since I shoot in DNG I will need to find an application that can generate Jpeg from these

Any photos of the camera?

6 is my favourite

Do you know what the shutter count is ?

That's what I was kind of thinking with the camera on the tripod having it pre focused and then as the cyclists go out of frame / focus on it then I can use the hand held one as they go past the tripod idea is only for distant shots as it would mean the focused point would stay in focus the closer would be hand held so I don't see how a tripod would be clumsy unless it's packing it up and moving It which wouldn't be done in a rush anyway I hope joystick head surely means its not as cumbersome to reframe the shot? Considering I have the hand held k5 for the times there is more movement.

Carmagw you have a good point about choosing the locations carefully ... I'm hoping there are some back roads so I can drive to other locations on the track without interfering with the race or Audax.

Father ted I seem to throw away a great number of shots anyway which is why digital is great

Heres the deal, I have volunteered to take some photos for my pal who is organising a two bike races. One is an Audax and the other is a race the next day. The races are 100km so quite long. He has said yes after seeing some of my photos lol. But now I wonder if I'm in over my head

I have a manfrotto tripod, a ball head and one of the lighter (3kg) joystick heads. Have access to two K5's, DA* 16-50mm, FA 50mm, DA 40mm, DA 55-300, DA 50-200 WR and other random bits and pieces.

So with the kit available do you guys think I should set up the tripod and a k5 with long lens on af-c on a stretch of road and have my other k5 with the 16-50 around my neck to take some closer up shots as the rider goes by ? And then drive to another spot where I can take some more shots and repeat until I need to go to the finish line and take some shots there? Maybe even rent a DA* Prime or the 60-250 to try it out and drool over!

Any advice would be appreciated as usual