Originally posted by Real Ale Hi I have joined this forum because I will be upgrading my wife's camera
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I have chosen the following
Pentax 18-55mm every day usage
Pentax 35mm for wide and portrait
Pentax 55-300mm for telephoto - I thought it might just be a useful one to have and would be put to good use at the Grand Canyon
Welcome to the forum!
Trust you'll have a good time photographing with Pentax gear - indeed many do, as this forum is testament to.
Just wanted to make a short remark about using 35mm for portrait work.
In case you weren't already aware, "typical" portraiture work is done using lenses around 50mm upwards, till 85mm or thereabouts; and that with fairly large max lens aperture, eg f1.8 or wider.
This gives a certain "look" to the results, eg compressed sense of depth, shallow DOF, strong isolation from background.
This is NOT at all to say that 35mm can't do portraiture, but it would give you a different result, a different genre of portraiture; perhaps you had in mind taking photos of small groups of people, as opposed to single individual?