The shell has a couple of dents, but seems very watertight - gullywashers last night, and no water to be found inside, despite the dent in the back top.
So I broke down and bought a Sigma 50-500 zoom lens, known in many circles as "Bigma" because it's a four pound monster of a lens with a vicious zoom and a cult following.
So far it seems the cult following is warranted. I've spent quite a few hours on pixel-peeper.com looking at images from long lenses like this, and the Bigma is head-and-shoulders above other third party offerings, from Sigma and from other vendors. Of course, Pentax doesn't make a lens in this range. The 60-250 f4 is a sweet piece of glass, but not long enough. I have the Tamron 180mm f2.5 and matched 1.4x TC that gets me a ~250mm f4 that's the equal of any zoom, and a 2x TC that makes it a 360mm f5, and still at least comparable to the zoom quality.
I shot fifty or sixty images in as many minutes, of inconsequential stuff like bike horns and swingset swivels, foxtails in the sunlight, and dead leaves. I saw lens shake in many images - 500mm is a LONG lens to stabilize regardless of the system - so I tripodded up, although the image accompanying this post is handheld. Critical focus is important, as the depth of field is very low, even at f11+.
I think this is not a low-light lens for anything that's not stationary. It's a sunlight lens - in the light haze today, I still had to shoot at ISO 800+ to get truly sharp images. No matter - I can't wait to shoot pix of the moon with this lens. It even has an aperture ring, so I can use the non-A teleconverter I have to make it a 1000mm f13 super telephoto! Combining ISO 1600 with some image stacking should net some really detailed images of the craters.
I think I'm going to return the Sigma 1.4x TC, however. It says it's for this lens, but if the zoom is at 50mm, the front element of the TC will impact the rear element of the lens. Not good, IMO. I'll pick up the Pentax 1.7x "Magic TC" instead. It has an autofocus motor inside it and adjusts focus by moving TC elements. This means that even manual focus lenses "snap in" to focus automatically when you get them close.
I can't wait to get out into some real woods and see what kinda bird/animal shots I can come up with using Bigma, though!
I had to get out and try my hand at that photographer's coming of age act, shooting fireworks on the 4th of July. Of course I've done it with film, many years ago, in a different life, but I had to take a stab at it with digital. I gotta tell you, shooting with digital is MUCH easier, folks. POP! - check image and histogram; too hot, adjust aperture - POP! rinse and repeat until satisfaction is achieved. Then, sit back with remote release in hand. Wait till you hear the shell launch, count to three, and fire the shutter...
The results are fairly predictable and pedestrian, but I got what I was looking for - saturated colors and sharp streaks that more-or-less capture the feel of a fireworks display. For those interested, I shot these at ISO 200, f11, with about a three second shutter. Shutter speed affects how long the streaks are, and can affect how many shells appear in a shot, but it doesn't materially affect exposure. F16 made the most saturated colors, but the streaks were dim and difficult to see, and at f8, all the streaks were blown out white.
This image is a collage of the ones I liked the best from my approximately sixty-five captures. I cut 'em out with photoshop and pasted 'em into a new black document. Came out ok, I think. although I could spend more time on cutting them out.
Next year I think I'm going to go with a wider lens and try and get some of the crowd in *with* the fireworks, lit by the fireworks. Might have to go to ISO400 or so, I'm thinking, but we'll see. I dunno, there will probably be more fireworks - Maybe I can catch 'em over by the stadium... hrmmm....
Many of the most interesting outdoors photographs you've seen in magazines all your life were shot in the hours of dawn +/-1 hr and dusk +/- 1 hr. There are a few reasons for this. For nature photographers, it's a requirement; many - even most - animals are most active during those two time slices. Fortunately, those hours also provide the most interesting light.
That's why, when you watch documentaries about, say, the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition, you see them rousting the models at 4:00 am and getting them ready to shoot. When the sun lights up the sky from low angles and makes gorgeous clouds and colors, you get the "golden hour"; the whole sky becomes your softbox, and that pink/gold cast that we see periodically is simply magical for images.
So Saturday we had storms around KC, and I've been wanting to catch the city, lit up by the low-angle sunlight, against dark, glowering clouds for some time, so I set out to do so. Left the house at 7:30-ish and drove down to the city, looking for places to shoot from. What I discovered is that most of the clear view locations from where I'd remembered seeing the images I wanted to capture were in the middle of highways or streets. Obviously, in retrospect. What I discovered is that vehicular scouting for locations with a certain view is frustrating and not very productive. I finally got a couple of semi-decent shots - not what I'm looking for, yet , but sorta ok - standing in the middle of Main Street at 30th or so.
Anyway, after I gave up on that particular task because I was having zero luck, I was driving home. I happened to see the shot above, and couldn't resist. The couple on the bridge spoke to me - "Pretty cool, ain't it?" and then went back to watching the sunset. I couldn't resist getting a couple of shots with the couple in-frame. I wish the phone lines hadn't been there, though.
So I got my old Pentax-M macro sold on ebay, and made a profit on it. I took that money and a little bit more and bought the Samsung Schneider-Kreuznach D-Xenon 100mm Macro for Samsung and Pentax DSLRs - which is a re-badged Pentax D-FA lens. I couldn't wait to try it out.
Pretty similar in appearance. The Sigma is a little warmer, maybe the Pentax a little more contrasty. When you go pixel-peeper on it, however, the difference really shows up. The Pentax is crisp and contrasty, but the Sigma goes all soft and dreamy - 
, and was looking for something to test it on. So I stuck a buncha Velcro on it, attached my Lumiquest 8x8inch softbox, pushed the head down to -10 degrees, strapped on the 100mm f4 Macro at maximum (1:2) magnification, and went hunting bugs or other interesting stuff that's tiny.
A couple of years ago I found a huge brown spider in my bathtub. I photographed it, and examined it carefully. Threw it in a jar and got out the loupe. Sure enough, loxosceles reclusa - the infamous Brown Recluse. It was a female with a body about the maximum size quoted by the various online .edu sites, approximately 3/4" long. Doesn't sound like much, does it? I swear that thing was 3" from toetip to toetip. And those legs aren't skinny, fragile looking legs like a grand daddy long legs has. They're thick and strong, and FAST.
This got me to researching brown recluse spiders. They're exceedingly common in the Midwest. One site I read said, "If you live in Missouri, Kansas, or Arkansas, you've got 'em in your attic or basement or both."
I read that they can live for up to two years in a closed box with no water or food. That's just evil, no matter how you cut it. They don't groom themselves, so residual pesticides are ineffective; you have to spray the poison ON the buggers to kill 'em. Unfortunately, people spray for 'brown recluse', end up killing all the spiders that feed on brown recluse, and end up with an infestation.
That's why this guy is my friend. I've watched these jumping spiders take brown recluse with abandon, running them down and jumping on them. It's a beautiful thing to see. There's a smaller, slightly less hairy version of this individual living on my desk lamp. We're buddies. I keep telling him as long as he eats the brownies, he's good in my book. He just smiles.
Finally I got a chance to break out the camera and wander around the yard with my macro rig in place. I'm sure I look strange enough to the neighbors - an old fat guy with a big ass camera rooting in the weeds and flower bed taking 
pictures of stuff so small you can't see it. No matter, it was a fruitful day. I got three or four images I consider "keepers". Here's my favorite - a little spider having a snack in one of my wife's peonies. He was remarkably relaxed for a little while, letting me shoot five or six images of him before he went scuttling down into the flower to finish in peace. Here's another one.
the garden, and one of them revealed the legs of a white flower spider, so I had to go back and get pictures of her. By then the sky had darkened with clouds, so I had to go with straight flash (instead of the flash/daylight composite above). She's an interesting looking critter, anyway. That flower is less than an inch across; she's maybe half an inch from toetip to toetip. She was very shy, scuttling around to the other side of the flower every time I got too close with my lens. She was probably just upset that I was scaring off her buffet.
grows in the garden outside my daughter's room. It's done with daylight and my Vivitar 283, and is extremely sharp at 100% pixel-peeper enlargement. I like the way the shadows fell and the detail visible in the center of the rose. All in all, a day when I can find three or four images that I like is a pretty good day.
I love spring. I love images of flowers - although, oddly enough, I'm less impressed with them in person than in image. In any case, the Daughter brought this green been plant home from school, planted in a small milk carton with the top cut off. It's growing very fast - I need to get it in the ground soon.
I took this picture some time ago in my back yard. The yellow background is my daughter's slide. I believe this was my Pentax-M 100mm f4 Macro lens, handheld. She kept turning her back to me, but this time I got her.
The image is considerably off-color when viewed via Firefox without the color space extension. In Safari, it looks the same way it does in Lightroom - the shell is much more red than it looks in Firefox. I can't say what it looks like in IE, though.
I love shooting bugs - and macro!
This is a photo from my new Pentax 50-135 f2.8 DA* lens. I love the lens already. It could be a little longer at the long end, I think, but the image quality is exceptional. I wandered around in the yard for a bit, shooting this and that. It's no macro lens - minimum focus is on the order of 3 feet or so - but it still does an admirable job of capturing anything from 1:4 on up.
The colors the lens produces are very contrasty and saturated. It focuses nearly silently, although it doesn't seem any faster than the screw drive lenses I have. The bokeh is usually smooth, although its character changes significantly depending on the type of background. Flare is very well controlled - I shot up through the tree limbs at the sun, got a small starburst and otherwise good contrast near the places the sun poked through.
All in all, I think it's well worth the money you spend on it. If you're shooting Pentax, get one!
There's an ant in the very center of this peony. We've got a bunch of 'em (peonies, not ants) in a small, rock circle in the front yard.
Woot! Got my Sigma 18-50mm f2.8 back from repair. Took 'em a month, but they seem to have done a very good job. It's not quite as contrasty as the 24-60 I sold my cousin, but it's pretty sharp and contrasty enough. It's the first lens I've bought that was targeted specifically at APSC sized sensors - I sure hope that the DSLR Pentax is supposed to release soon isn't a full frame unit!
My lens lineup is nearly complete; I'm only missing a good long zoom and a really long telephoto. I'm considering a pair of old Tamron lenses - the 19AH 70-210 f3.5 is a great long zoom, being only half a stop slower than the 2.8, but a fraction of the price and weight. Macro on the 19AH goes down to something like 2.5:1, also.
The other Tamron lens I'm thinking about picking up is the 500 f8 cat. On my APSC sensor-ed K20D, that should behave like a 750mm! I had one for a while for my film cameras, and it was fun, but not flexible enough. I think on the K20D, with the autoISO feature, it can be much more flexible. I'm pretty sure it will work in AV on the K20D, too. I know those lenses are very sharp. I also have the 1.4x SP teleconverter from Tamron - that would make it behave like a ~1200mm f11... bright sun only, but wow, talk about a 'reach out and touch something' lens!
reasonable manner proclaim that it is not art.
pixels, but a record of the intent - however whimsical - of the photographer, whether that photographer is Robert Mapplethorpe, Leonard Nimoy, or your old aunt Jeanie. That image is art. Good art, bad art, nonsensical art, ridiculous art - but it is art.
So way back in the 80s, my wife and I went to the zoo. We were without child then, but were both animal lovers just the same, so off we went. I took my T90 and canon FD lenses along so I could shoot pictures along the way.
For some reason, I have always loved taking pictures of flowers. I know I'm not alone - there are lots of such pictures to be found on Flickr. But the common nature of such images hasn't reduced my fascination one bit.
I tried for days to get this image. I know, it seems fairly simple, but the flowers are under the roof on my back porch, in shade, and I had a really hard time getting an exposure that I liked. I either had too little depth of field or too much, too little contrast or none at all, or subdued colors - for some reason, I couldn't capture the intensity of the colors.
Then I got my 100mm Macro (an old Pentax-M lens originally destined, I believe, for a dentist's office) and things came together. I finally got the right balance of contrast and color, and got the right bits in focus (I think). At least this captures fairly closely my internal representation of these little pink flowers.
Macro photography is probably my favorite type of photography these days. back when I was younger, it was glamor photography, but things change. Anyway, I came across this beetle - he was about 1/4 inch long - and popped off a few caps of him. I didn't even know until I got the image on my iMac that his shell was transparent. I'd have taken more pictures if I had.
This was shot with an old SMC Pentax-M 100 f4 Macro. It's an old lens that was popular with dentists, and it only does half life size. But it's contrasty and sharp and works well on my K20D. Old tech meets new and works really well.
That's one of the main reasons I chose Pentax, rather than Canon (which is what I shot, mostly, in film). I'd always loved the old SMC Pentax lenses - they had an almost Zeiss or Leitz type contrast and saturation - but I couldn't afford an LX, while A1s and even F1s were a couple hundred dollars. But nowadays, I can indulge my old fetish - and I have, with several old Pentax lovelies.
For hand held macro, I use a 'point and shoot' system. I have an ancient Vivitar 283 with the manual adjustment plug, and a Lumiquest on-flash softbox made for event photographers. The softbox nearly hangs over the end of the lens, giving me a very diffuse light source. I run the lens out to (usually) maximum magnification. I set the K20D for "Catch-in-focus" (where it fires the shutter when the sensor detects something is in focus), and I walk up to a test subject until the shutter triggers. I adjust flash power, test again, adjust flash power - then delete all the test images and head out to the garden. By now, I know that anything that's in focus will be properly exposed.
You still have to pick your target's pose properly. Because of the extremely short distances involved, something a little closer to the lens can get significantly more exposure. Also, if you're not shooting in bright - and I mean BRIGHT - sunlight, you can get the "flash look" where the background is pitch black. So if you want to do this hand-held macro work, pick your "stage" carefully.
You can spend (literally) hours walking around your back yard photographing tiny stuff. Give it a shot, it's fun.
I hate spiders. A LOT. I hate them the way slugs hate salt. And of all the spiders I'm ever likely to meet, I hate Loxosceles Reclusa the most. They're just evil. You can tell in this picture just how evil they are.
The discovery of a big mother brown in our bathtub led me to cruising the internet looking for information on this beauty. Turns out the only way to be SURE is to count their eyes. I have a couple of images that allow me to do so, and she has six, in just the right places. Anyway, after spending way too much time on sites about spiders that had .edu in the URL, I learned more about browns that I ever wanted to know. Including lovely trivia like, they can live in a sealed box with no food or water for over a year. That's when I decided they're evil.
The sites often question the brown's reputation for producing disgustingly damaging bites, but there was enough waffling that I'm not ready to discount their bite as potentially SUCKING out loud.
This one got stuck in a plastic bowl that I had left under the toilet's shut off valve after replacing it, just in case it dripped. When I came back upstairs and checked for drips a couple days later, I found this scene. Her body is 3/4" long, and the long leg span you see there approaches three inches. Well, it did. I followed this up by flushing her and her dinner down the toilet.
Because I'm so scared of them, I have to take their pictures. It's a compulsion. I'm not sure why, and paging through my photos gives me the willies sometimes. But I kinda liked the way this image turned out, anyway.
I shot this image back in the 80's, when the Missouri Raptor Center ( I think it was the group ) would bring these big, beautiful birds out to the Renaissance festival to show all the wannabe falconers what their birds would have looked like back in the day.
I shot this image on Ektachrome. For you youngsters, that means FILM, and SLIDE FILM, to boot. I love my digital cameras, but there was a certain sense of accomplishment in being able to deliver consistently good exposures on slide film, which was unforgiving, at best.
I shot this with a Canon T90 and a Tamron SP 80-200 2.8. Manual focus, too, and the combo weighed as much as a Buick. I wish I still had that lens; it would work wonderfully on my Pentax K20D.
