I understand it does, but have yet to look into it closely. AWB is IMHO the one to avoid, unless of course it happens to give you exactly the results you want.

Getting a rapport with the model, talking to the model, experimenting with the height of the camera in particular I think are all areas to develop here.

Then looking at lighting direction, high and low lighting, soft boxes, umbrellas.....

Your poses are a little awkward yet, so keep at it. It's not easy and takes quite a bit of thought. You're starting off with the right ideas, which is great!

I'm going to beg to differ on that one. Studio portraiture can be anything you want it to be, and there's no such thing as "correct" lighting. Otherwise, all images would be the same and that would be very boring.

True, we can use Hollywood lighting (Beauty lighting), Butterfly lighting, Rembrandt lighting or whatever other recognised techniques there are. But equally we can be as off the wall as we like if the end result looks good and does what we want.

The studio is not a place to constrict us down to following the "rules" but an environment where we have total control over the light. If we want shadows, then shadows it is. In fact just one light could be all we need.

I wouldn't want to discourage the OP for a moment - experiment and develop your own style.

An extreme example would be to take a photo of an object on a sunny day, once from the front-lit position and once from the back-lit position. The colour would be totally different.

Well done!

Same applies, the tungsten setting will vary slightly unless you stop the camera doing that.

The light may reflect differently off the flowers at different angles. The same way that grass ends up in stripes after mowing.

1 and 3 are similar, so you've answered your own question really. The light direction was changed and resulted in a different colour.

If this was AWB then changing to using Daylight or Cloudy will reatin the colour of the ambient light, but you also need to change the custom setting so that the camera doesn't continue to adjust things even at those settings.

Interesting. When I upgraded to IE8 there were no problems whatsoever.

Presumably there are other factors involved that are relevant to our particular computers.

First of all the Tamron design is much older, from an era where wide angles needed very large front elements to avoid vignetting.

Second you can't compare a 21mm and 28mm lens. The tamron uses older technology to deliver what was a very wide lens in its day. The Pentax is a compact M design that is only made possible by new computer-aided designs. And some clever engineering. It's a beautiful little lens.

Chalk and cheese.

In a literal sense yes, because if they use the wrong setting they won't get the right picture. No point taking a landscape at f4 if you want to have focus from front to back and need f16.

I think what we're talking about in this thread is the learning curve so that we can learn the basics so we can produce the images we want.

In the sense you probably mean, no, I agree. It doesn't matter whether we use M, Tv, Av or whatever else as long as we are doing what we want and understanding what's going on.