Need Help Choosing a Lens

[PaulWog]

Just addressing your original post, didn't read through everything else:

Those wonderful eyes you're seeing are done with a photoshop method. Most of the eye edits in my opinion are overdone and a little fake -- put that on the mantle and it will impress guests as a picture, great for her business, but if you live with a shot like that day to day the eyes will seem more and more fake. I don't dislike the effect at all, it's just easy to do overdo (just like HDR, or shallow depth of field are sometimes overused in order to easily/cheaply impress others). The effect can be done to the level you want it though. In one case, I saw a shot that she added too many fake squiggles to an eye (but the average person might not notice that). It's really easy to do, you can find a tutorial on ways to do it (it's pretty straight forward).

The biggest beginner mistake you can make is confusing what a lens & camera can do with what good technique can do (and what photoshop can do). Lenses don't make the eyes pop, good technique and photoshop do (although a very cheap lens can suck enough to make eyes look bad). The major thing you should pay attention to is the aperture limitations of a lens, if that blurred out (shallow depth of field) effect is what you want. As a beginner, my biggest mistake was buying an f3.5-f5.6 zoom lens on DX. Way too limited for the types of shots I so often want to take.