Thank you all for your advice.

After some research and looking at other posts on this forum I have ordered the Tamron 17-50/2.8 as recommended by a couple of people as being nearly as good as the Pentax 16-50 but quite a bit cheaper. I needed some overlap with the 12-24 so this seemed the best option.

I am now going to wait until the Sigma 50-150 is readily available in Pentax fit, read some reviews, and decide between it and the Pentax 50-135.

I may even be brave enough to post some of my images!

Thanks again

Tim

Hi badbrother

Thanks again for the detailed response. Lots of food for thought.
The 50-135 does look very good. I had read elsewhere on this forum that because they are sealed that if they are damaged then they are total writeoffs.

I have tried to run various Exif analysers on my photos from the last year to see what focal length I use most, but all the free ones I have tried crash part way through. Any suggestions?

Also as I am a relative newbie to digital photography, please excuse my ignorance - what is LBA? (My nearest guess was Len Buying Addiction!)

Tim

Hi Dan

Thanks for the response. I did not know that Pentax were producing a 17-70. I already have an old A series manual focus 50 1.4, would that still be reasonable quality given that it is on an APS-C sensor camera, and I don't mind focussing?

Tim

Hi badbrother

Thanks for the prompt reponse.
Unfortunately its approx £800 total

Tim

I got back into photography about 1 year ago, after a 10 year gap (previous cameras ME Super and MX). At the time I bought the Samsung GX-10 with the 2 kit lenses as I was not sure whether I would get back into photography, and at the time the kit was £200 cheaper than the equivalent K10D kit.

Roll forward 1 year and I am glad I got back into photography. Photoshop allows me to do all the things I tried and generally failed to do in the darkroom, and I am producing photos at a prolific rate.

In the last year I have also purchased a Pentax 12-24mm, Sigma 100-300m f4 and matched Sigma 1.4 teleconverter, and Sigma 105mm macro.

Getting to my question I need 2 quality lenses to fill the gap (and probably overlap a bit) between my wide-angle and telephoto zooms to replace my kit lenses (which produce excellent images if you stop down a bit and don't go too near the extremes of the zoom), and wish to spend about £800 on the two lenses. What would you all suggest?

In terms of use I shoot anything that moves, or doesn't, and produce up to A3 sized prints for entry into competitions at the camera club I have re-joined, where I need to produce 30 entries a year for the various competitions.

Thanks in advance

Tim

You may wish to consider the subjects you will be photographing.
I chose the Sigma because at 300mm you are generally taking photographs of things that are moving (eg animals, motorsport, athletics, aircraft) and a zoom lets you get the shot on those occasions where the subject gets too close and you are unable to move backwards. You can also get the matched Sigma 1.4 converter when conversely the subject is too far away.

Whichever one you buy I don't think you'll regret it.

Tim

Thanks very much for the 3rd place John, and well done with the judging.
I only joined the forum a week or so ago, and its great to see everybody's images and to join in.

I agree totally with your comments.
I think the image is too light as I am using to producing images for printing, and so always prepare them a little light as they always seem to darken a bit when I print them.

I see what you mean about levelling the image. I was standing in the sea at the time, trying to not drop my camera and tripod in the sea and not fill my wellies with water, as there is no true horizon in the image I'm not quite sure what is level, but I will try your suggestion.

I look forward to taking part in future competitions.

Tim

I moved to a Mac last year and haven't looked back. I having nothing against PC's and use one everyday at work. However for home use and Photoshopping I would definitely recommend a Mac.

For the PC programs I still need I use Parallels for Mac http://www.parallels.com . It runs Windows very quickly as a virtual machine, integrates very well with MacOS, and means you don't need a reboot when switching OS'es. You can even run a PC application in its own MacOS window.
I don't think it supports 64-bit Vista, so it depends on how much you need the 64-bit OS. You could run bootcamp for the 64-bit and then run 32-bit Vista under Parallels.

You save your virtual Windows machines as normal files, which means if one becomes corrupt you just copy one back you have stored elsewhere, no need to reinstall Windows, and you can also have multiple virtual Windows configurations all running at once.

Just had my TC repaired at Sigma, it was a faulty TC.