Lens safely and securely arrived at its new home in perfect condition.

Thanks Mike - maybe one for the future when I'm a bit more accomplished. As it is, I have bought a 35mm f2.4 from the classifieds.

Thanks for the welcomes.

I have some fantastic ones of my daughter but don't want to publish them on the internet - if you PM me I could send you a link to a dropbox gallery of images taken over the last month or two with no post processing.

Edit - most were taken indoors with no artificial light.

I'd had a standard point and shoot (it might as well have been a phone) then moved onto a Canon Powershot G10. Really learnt the basics with that, so when I was lucky enough to come by a £500 inheritance, I decided it was time to get a DSLR.

So I set about researching what I could get for my budget, knowing only 2 things for certain

1. I had a £500 budget that I couldn't go over
2. Only Nikon and Canon make DSLRs

After a bit of Googling for reviews I had some new information.

1. There was a Canon in my price range and the reviewers raved about what videos it took but not much else
2. There was a Nikon in my price range and the reviewers found the menus to be intuitive
3. There was something called a Pentax, reviewers liked it, it had a good viewfinder, had in-camera anti-shake mechanisms and, according to the photos, was blue and covered in drops of water.

The reviewers didn't like the video capabilities, but I don't take videos and if I wanted to, the Powershot was half decent at that anyway.

I'd never heard of Pentax but read up on them and soon became confident that the K30 was the camera for me. Then came 3 bits of extraordinary luck

1. Mine was black
2. Mine was dry
3. My father in law, who had owned a Pentax SLR in the 80s, donated me his lenses - and they worked! My favourite is an A 35-105mm 3.5 which, although it has some glittery speckles on the inside of the front optic, does seem to take very crisp clear photos.

Glad I did my research!

Hello!

OK I'll be straight with you - I only actually joined the forum because I'd seen a lens I really wanted in the classified ads section. But in my defence, I had been reading the forums for a while - especially the user photos, and I am here introducing myself now!

So I'm fairly new to this, and still seem to spend much more time reading and learning than actually taking photos. Photography isn't something I'd have expected would interest me, in fact I didn't own a camera, or have any interest in taking photos, until I was well past 30.

For the last few years, we had a Canon Powershot G10. Just after we bought it, my mother in law bought me a book on how to get the most out of it. I read it cover to cover, and became instantly fascinated. A lot of what it taught me, the basics of manual digital photography I guess, was transferrable so when I felt like there was more I wanted to do that the Powershot couldn't do, it became DSLR time.

I would rattle on for a while now about how I ended up with my Pentax K30 but I've noticed there's another thread about why people choose Pentax so I'll save it for there.

Until recently I'd have said I was leaning towards landscape and architecture. The basis for this would be that I instinctively seem to try to avoid taking photos with any people in them whatsoever. This has particularly frustrated my wife who, having accompanied me on so many lovely holidays, gets home to find that she doesn't actually feature in any of the photos.

This all changed last year when we had our first baby. When my daughter looks at other grown men, I'm pretty sure she thinks that they are somehow incomplete, as they don't have that plastic and glass extensioon on their face that Daddy permanently has.

My wife bought me the 50mm 1.8 for Christmas and it's been something of a revelation - I can't believe how much personality and colour is in the photos.

I'm now taking the adventurous step of taking photos with more than one person in them, but have found that the 50mm is a little restrictive in this endeavour, as if the people I want to photograph together are more than 1 foot apart, I need to be in another postal district in order to fit them into the frame.

So that brings me back to the beginning again, looking forward to receiving a wider lens in order to continue my meander into more social photography. Thanks John.

So that's me. Sorry for the long post, and for doing things in the wrong order!

Hi - I'd like to make an offer so have joined the forum, but have no way of messaging you. Please could you PM me your email address?