Please don't take this the wrong way, but if you have not yet grasped the basics of aperture/shutter settings required for a given type of shot then you are a very long way off being ready to tackle something as challenging and important as a wedding.

I think you need to stop buying equipment, put most of the equipment you already have in a safe place for later and just concentrate on getting to grips with the camera (I recommend the K10D) and the kit lens (18-55) and maybe the Sigma 70-300.

You are trying to run before you can stand up much less walk, and I'd hate to see your obvious enthusiasm for a highly rewarding hobby squashed by trying to do too much too quickly.

Kit's great, but it's what you do with it that makes the image.

certainly if I was going taking portraits (something I don't do much of) I wouldn't be without my 50 1.4.

So the macro hunts too much for portrait work, ok, the OP said he has 3 ~50mm primes already, what are the other two and why are they not suitable?

I'm not trying to be argumentative here, just trying to ask the questions the OP needs to ask himself to know that he's spending his money on a lens that will actually help him over and above what he already has.

forgive me if this is a stupid question, but if the length you really want is 50/55, why not just use the 50 Macro you already have?

Is there something about the macro that makes it unsuitable for portraits? I used to have one on a work camera and it seemed fantastic in every way, just couldn't get enough of the double clutched quick shift.

[dalek voice]

behold! a new paradigm of PEN-TAX!!!!!!

[/dalek voice]

glad I'm not the only one who thought that when I saw the episode!

Nope, we drive on the correct side of the road, all you others are just following Napoleon!

my Grandparents last cat moved in of his own accord. They eventually established that he belonged to a family in the village a mile or so away.

It turned out the family had multiple young kids who pulled the cat about too much and he just upped and left. Gran and Grandad gave him back the first few times but eventually it was decided (mutually with the family) that he obviously prefered living with my Grandparents and thus it was settled.

you know what they say

"it is better to have loved and to have lost, than to have listened to an album by Olivia Newton John"

if it was overcast and the clouds moved between shots the colour temperature of the light could easily change by enough to cause that colour shift in a few seconds. The sky seems quite burnt out so I can't tell if it was a cloudy day or not.

actually that's not true, the lens coatings are optimised for a specific wavelength and transmission coeficient of plane glass a function of wavelenth even before you add the coatings.

I would expect a variation in colour between different coating types (say SMC vs Tamron BBAR) and quite possibly between different generations from the same manufacturer.


The variation in colour between those two shots is very slight, I couldn't see it until I put them in separate tabs and flicked between them. Are you sure you processed both shots with the same white ballance? when shooting RAW it makes no difference what the camera is set to, only what the RAW conversion software was set to (unless the RAW software was set to "camera" of course).

interesting piece of weather trivia from a Meteorological Physics course which I took as an undergrad.

A challenge was once held between the Met office and a group of students. The Met office used all the tools at their disposal to produce a weather forcast which was accurate ~62% of the time.

The students went with the theory that "tomorrow will be roughly the same as today", and achieved an accuracy rating of 61%.


I liked my Meteorological Phyiscs course, partly because it was interesting, but mostly because ALL of the maths is so mindbending that it can't be solved without a supercomputer. This limited the choice of exam questions!