You get around a bit !

Welcome to the forum.

The bird looks a bit dark to me (on my poor work monitor), perhaps a bit of selective lightening of the subject ?

No, don't give up!

If I can add a few points:

Taking pictures of flowers outside when it is windy is very hard. You really need to wait for a still day, ideally a bright, slightly cloudy one so you have diffused light.

Tripod....you should use a tripod if you want to shoot with the limited depth of field that an f2.0 lens will have. You need to get the focus point spot-on. I assume you took this from around 4 feet ? If so your DOF would be less than 2 inches. It takes practice to get this right without a split-prism screen.

You used ISO 400, but could have gone lower as you obviously had good light, and again a tripod would give you more flexibility with this (on a still day !)

Your exif also shows you had dialed in 12mm as the focal length for the shake reduction. Althogh this would not have added shake to your photo, it wont have assisted it either. You should have entered 50mm as the focal length.

Keep practicing and you will get there.

Excellent shots, you must be very happy with the lens.

Wonderful shot RR.

We have two pairs of robins in our garden. They seem to live on opposite sides and occasionally chase each other away. It is great how they come so close when we are gardening.

Dave

I have used this chap a few times to have M lenses repaired. I can recommend him.

http://www.cam-rep.co.uk/

yep i gave up too.

Perhaps I should have made myself a bit clearer.

I shoot raw all the time, and when processing if I find a better WB that the camera AWB setting, I will apply that to all photos taken under the same lighting. I do find that the K10 AWB is fine for outdoor daylight almost all the time.

I use AWB most of the time. But for the light tent you should set the WB to the colour temp of your light source. You can either select 5000 or use the custom WB feature.

In a light tent you will also need to adjust the exposure. The meter will try to render the white background grey.

I know you say you dont want a back pack, but I have not looked back since I got mine. Plenty of room for a lot of kit, plus it can double as a "general" bag too.

But the best thing is I dont get shoulder ache anymore like I did with a shoulder bag.