Hi - 85/2 sold but 28/3.5 and 135/3.5 still available

Cheers,

Jon

Sadly need to prune my amount of photo gear so starting by offering three great lenses, ready for that great FF body in the future

28/3.5 SMCM in superb shape. Optically mint and cosmetically only showing very minor signs of very careful use. Comes with front and rear caps plus Hoya skylight filter. Quite sought after and has a rather higher reputation than the more common 28/2.8. At 42mm equivalent on APSC it's an ideal walkabout standard lens. £60 incl insured postage

85/2 SMCM fabulous fast short telephoto. Again optically (and mechanically) superb and cosmetically in good shape. It has some minor brassing consistent with its age but clearly well cared-for. Comes with caps and Pentax hood. And I think I have the box too. These tend to go for silly money on EBay, but I think it's madness to charge more than the cost of a new Samyang! I think £170 incl insured postage is more realistic

135/3.5 SMCM lovely example in close to as new condition. Optically and mechanically great, one or two minor dust specs inside but nothing to worry about, cosmetically superb with only one or two tiny minor marks. Comes with caps (and built in hood). £45 incl recorded delivery

Happy to provide photos if you're interested - send me a pm!

Cheers,

Jon

If you're ok with manual lenses and after a bargain, I could be persuaded to part with a Pentax 85/2 SMCM. PM me if you're interested.

Jon

Best option is probably a 50-135 DA* if you can stretch to it. Or perhaps a DA70 Limited? The Pentax or Sigma 17-70 lenses may do what you need too, but not as well as the DA*.....

Excellent series - especially like the kingfisher, as they're so difficult to find.

Lovely pictures - are they your daughters? And yes I use this feature quite a lot too. In my case, I find catch-in focus is often more reliable than I am when using an equally aged Tamron 500mm mirror lens:







I agree it's really useful.

Cheers,

Jon

I tend to veer between two extremes.

First is to try and get the image almost done in the camera, and thn use LR for minimal tweaking (check white balance, contrast, sharpening and noise).

Second is to deliberately go much further, either towards monochrome (Nik SilverEfex) or something "arty" for want of a better word. For the latter, I really like OnOne Perfect Suite. Some great tools which are simple and quick to use. Also comes with Perfect Resize (aka updated Genuine Fractals), a layers tool for LR, a great portrait retouching module, Focalpoint (fiddle with depth of field and blur) and a decent black and white capability if you don't have SilverEfex. It's a great deal of fun.

Jon

You're doing better than me... Still struggling to get galleries on my home page! Hopefully worth persevering though as I think the end results will hopefully be worth it....

Jon

I have a Katzeye screen - they are excellent but not a cheap option. There are a number of options that you can include (focussing marks, grid, etc) and their "Optibrite" coating is very good at keeping the viewfinder very nice and bright.

As noted above, no impact on autofocus performance, although you may need to adjust exposures a little (I've not had issues with mine so far).

No need to worry about use stopping down. The lens will remain wide open unless you use the depth of field preview or press the green button (which only stops down for an instant) in order to get the camera to set the right exposure.

Best wishes,

Jon

Consensus from people I know using the likes of the Canon 5D etc is that they are not forgiving of cheaper lenses, and it's even more important than APSC to get the best glass you can.

Going to bow out of this thread now - it's taking too much time but has been friendly and respectful even though there's rather a divergence of views, not a characteristic of all photo forums but long may it continue here!

Cheers,

Jon