Creative Exercise with Prime Lenses

Try shooting with a minimal kit of one to three prime lenses sometime. It is a useful excercise in creativity to limit yourself in this way. If you do not have a 50mm lens already, look for the SMC Pentax-FA 50/1.4 or 50/1.7 lenses as well as the SMC Pentax-F 50/1.4 and 50/1.7 lenses on eBay or other used photo gear sources. All four of these are excellent lenses and give you a great portrait and low light lens.

If you are willing to work with manual focus, find any of the Pentax-A 50mm lenses. They are all good performers and will still give you full functionality except for autofocus with any Pentax digital SLR. Lenses from the original K-mount series (marked SMC Pentax alone) as well as the later M series (marked SMC Pentax-M) are slightly harder to work with because you have to meter in a slightly different way. In any case, give a few prime lenses a chance or, if nothing else, set a zoom lens to a particular focal length and shoot at only that focal length for a creative exercise.