[alexmann]

Hi All,

Well just registered here after buying a Pentax K-x a couple of months ago.

My photography history really started with a Ricoh 35mm at university which I had for over a decade. I went digital in December 2003 as film was getting expensive for all the family shots I was taking with having a young family, but quickly went from my little Olympus point-and-shoot to a Finepix bridge camera with decent optical zoom. I had an s8100fd which took some great pictures, but after a friend of mine set up his own photography company (investing in a Canon 5D Mk II) he told me how much decent dSLRs had come down in price. That led me to an extensive review of cameras in my (second hand) budget, which narrowed the search down to Sony or Pentax, with the Pentax winning out. What I wanted was a camera body with good all-round features, in-camera stabilisation (to keep lens cost down), decent speed and ISO range (for action and low-light shots).

The Fujifilm 8100 was a good compromise at the time, but suffered from limited wide-angle, speed and some chromatic abberations at high zoom (it had an 18x optical zoon, so not surprising). It also had some issues with capturing accurate representations of reds (I was trying to take a picture of a predominantly red model with several shades of red, which proved challenging) which I then found was a common feature of lower-end digital (and I'm talking about all non-dSLR stuff here I guess). Good for general stuff, but failing a little with some of the more demanding applications I was using it for.I do ask a lot of a camera - the sort of things I take pictures of vary a lot - from macro pictures of wildlife and models, through general (and often fast) shots of the family (we've 3 kids, a cat and a dog!), landscapes and then to high-zoom subjects such as wildlife (birds) and aircraft.

At the moment I just have the standard 18-55mm Pentax kit lens (another reason to go with the Pentax was the quality of the kit lens), but am looking for a decent long-range zoom - probably a Tamron 70-300 or Sigma 100-300 (any further suggestions always welcomed!). I use Lightroom 4.1 for all my captures (all shot in RAW), and wish I'd it years ago...it's amazing!

Anyway, I'm looking forward to this "next stage" of my phtographic biography, and always looking to learn!

[Adam]

Welcome! You might also want to take a look at the DA 55-300mm from Pentax. You can read more about it in our lens database or our in-depth homepage review