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Originally Posted by mistyp
Thank you for the suggestion, Matt! If I didn't get the kit lens, it looks like the DA 40mm f/2.8 Limited would add about $200 to my purchase price. That's not bad but likely would push back the purchase date a bit.
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Your daughter's not going to be 9 months old now. Buy right away, save up for better lenses.
There's three factors involved in that particular picture. Well, it all comes down to one -- it was pretty dark in the room. So, that means I was using a shutter speed of 1/25th of a second, which isn't fast enough to stop moving kids. (At that speed range, you end up with a lot of blurs-for-hands.)
Second, it's at a wide-open aperture of f/2.8, which has a pretty shallow depth of field -- according to one online calculator (
http://www.dofmaster.com/dofjs.html) at this close focus that means there's an acceptably-in-focus area less than three inches deep. If you look at my older daughter's shoulder, you can see it's in focus there, and in anything aligned with that (like the younger one's face, actually, but I think she's also moving a bit).
Finally, again because of the light this was at ISO 1600. Since it was shot in JPEG, which means that there's some noise and noise reduction applied. If I had the time to shoot in RAW and postprocess carefully, I could run it through fancier software, which would help some.
A faster (f/1.4) lens would help with the shutter speed or ISO, but it'd make the depth of field even worse. This is a pretty big issue with dSLRs that takes some getting used to. Of course, it's also an advantage for those portrait shots with the blurred background that everyone loves.
You should put "flash, with bounce/tilt head" on your to-buy-next list (it's on mine). The on-camera flash is just as crappy as that in a P&S camera, but if you can bounce off of the ceiling, suddenly you can get pretty good nice lighting on demand.
Oh, and the other thing to be aware of with focus on a dSLR -- P&S cameras use edge-contrast-based autofocusing, which is slower but can work on any area of the picture. dSLRs (except for the just-announced semi-pro $1800+ Nikons) can only focus at specific pre-defined points (11 of them on the K100D). That takes some getting used to too -- I still often find myself with what would have been a great picture focused on the background. (Drat!) Pentax, by the way, has one of the very best autofocus systems in affordable dSLRs. The Nikon D40, for example, has
only 3 points (in fairness, those three points are supposed to be very fast and accurate, but still).
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PS: You have adorable girls!
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Thanks!