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Anonymous
All a teleconverter does is extend the range of your lens. It doesn't make it a better quality lens or anything.
Your S3IS more than encompasses all the focal lengths normally used for portraiture with its 36-432 equivalent lens, and then some. If I'm not mistaken, usually only fashion photographers will ever use lengths longer than that in portraiture.
A suggestion: Know your equipment. Shoot test shots from a tripod of an object at a fixed distance at different focal lengths, note how far into the zoom it is and the image number. Look at the EXIF data and construct a table, so you can choose something similar to all the typical portaiture lengths: 75mm, 90mm, 105mm, etc.
Don't note down just 4x or 2x or any of that imprecise stuff, something like "when the camera says 2x plus five taps (and you'll have to be constant or this is useless) to the zoom control, the lens is at xmm."
I did this with my stepped superzoom point and shoot, and it really comes in handy to get the creative control needed. It also helps with this candid portraiture: if you can remember, say, "2x zoom plus one little tap to the control gets me as close as this camera will get to 75mm," and then use it like a 75mm prime, it works wonders for doing that. Also, observe the optical properties of the lens at different focal lengths.
It takes maybe an hour of work to do the medium telephoto lengths that are useful. At the wide and the far telephoto end, I don't think this is nearly as useful. I know how to get my camera to 42mm, because I like that focal length a lot and it's easy to get to on mine, but otherwise I didn't bother.
If I had thought of doing all this when I was using the S3IS, I'd pass it along to you, but it wasn't until after my S3IS got stolen and I moved onto a different model that I thought of doing all this.
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