The Best Gear for Eclipse Photography
An interview with Ken Curry, president, Ricoh Imaging Americas, plus more from NASA
By cjfeola in Articles and Tips on Mar 18, 2024
The April 8 Eclipse has turned into an international festival. More than 30 million people are in the path of the totality, which will stretch thousands of miles from the Pacific coast of Mexico to the Atlantic coast of Canada. A partial eclipse will be visible across almost the entire North American continent.
We’re photographers here at Pentax Forums, so we plan to participate in this festival the usual way-by photographing it! We kicked off our coverage with The Total Eclipse Viewing Guide, which laid out everything you need to know about the eclipse itself; the path of totality, the timing, and even dealing with the traffic snarled by the event. (Traffic is projected to be so bad that several Texas counties have already declared disasters for the event.)
Then bdery gave us How To Photograph A Solar Eclipse, a step-by-step guide to safely and successfully capture photos of the sun, covering filters and other gear, camera settings and lens selections.
Today we have more advice on photographing the eclipse. And who better to advise on photographing an eclipse – or anything really – with Pentax gear than…Pentax! Here’s Ken Curry, president, Ricoh Imaging Americas Corporation.
“ANY camera and photographer should practice safety first as it pertains to the solar eclipse. Approved solar glasses and filters should be used when viewing or photographing the eclipse. Not using this protection will damage your camera and your retina,” Curry told Pentax Forums.
Pentax cameras run the gamut from the screw mount Spotmatic to the K-3 III, so Curry spoke about photographing the eclipse with both film and digital cameras.
“Most of the tactics when shooting the eclipse will be the same for both film and digital. However, DSLRs can offer a better experience due to "live view." A film camera will require the photographer to repeatedly view through the viewfinder and, since the camera will be on a tripod angled upwards toward the sun, they will need to bend frequently to adjust the camera to compensate for the Earth’s rotation. Additionally, since the photographer is looking through the optical viewfinder, a solar, not ND, filter is required. A remote control can also aid in the image capture, once the framing has been set.”
The Total Eclipse Viewing Guide
How to catch the biggest eclipse in a century
By cjfeola in Photography on Mar 6, 2024
The moon will block out the sun and create a path of unnatural night across North America on April 8. Starting from the Pacific Ocean, the total eclipse of the sun will enter Mexico around noon, then head up through Texas north and east to the Great Lakes. From there the path of totality will follow the US-Canadian border before heading out into the Atlantic in the early evening, after which a partial eclipse will be visible from Great Britain and Ireland.
If you miss it, you can catch the next North American total solar eclipse on Aug. 23, 2044. If you’re down under, a total eclipse will cross Australia in July, 2028.
The eclipse is generating Super Bowl levels of traffic and price hikes...If you can imagine a Super Bowl played in a stadium thousands of miles long, one hundred miles wide, and you only got to see four minutes of the game before it all moves on.
So many sightseers are expected that one Texas county has already declared a state of emergency. So why drive? Why not just get a place to stay? Well, unless you’re crashing with family, you’re probably out of luck. Most places are sold out, despite 10x price hikes. And you may be out of luck even with your fam; they may have listed their place for a short-term rental. Airbnb reports searches in the path of the eclipse are up 1,000 percent.
Want more than 4 minutes of total eclipse? Delta is offering flights that take off as the eclipse reaches Texas and fly along the totality path to Detroit, offering maximum exposure; hours of eclipse.
It seems like the entire continent is in the grip of eclipse fever, and we have to admit that we’ve got it bad too here at Pentax Forums. This is the first in the series of articles:
- When and where is the path of the eclipse, and how to see it (This article)
- How to photograph the eclipse
- Advice on eclipse photography from B&H, NASA and Pentax
- A special eclipse photography challenge from Pentax Forums!
The second and third articles will appear in the coming weeks; soon enough to grab anything you're missing! We'll also announce the rules and prizes for the special eclipse challenge this month; the images will be submitted after the eclipse, of course.
Pentax Announces 35mm Half-frame Film Camera
Coming in summer with manual film winding and a lens based on the Espio Mini
By cjfeola in Pentax Announcements on Mar 1, 2024
The first half-frame camera in Pentax's storied film history will ship this summer, according to Film Project Designer Takeo "TKO" Suzuki. The camera will feature manual film winding and rewinding, an electronic shutter, automatic exposure control, and a lens with the same 25mm field of view of the Ricoh Auto Half, with the optical design based on the Pentax Espio Mini.
TKO made the announcement in a new video dropped on the Pentax Film Project web page early March 1 (Tokyo time).
As in previous videos, TKO started by thanking everyone for the outpouring of worldwide support for The Pentax Film Project. He said the project has a working prototype, and he'd been out shooting with it. "
Ricoh Camera Business: Strong and Growing
Ricoh reports Q3 results; cameras remain a bright spot
By cjfeola in Photo Industry News on Feb 14, 2024
Ricoh reported 3rd quarter financial results to investors on Feb. 6, and once again singled out the results of Ricoh Imaging and Pentax. “The camera business remained strong and sales increased,” Ricoh reported. Strong results from the company’s Ricoh Imaging division — which includes Pentax cameras and lenses, and the Ricoh GR III series — have become a regular feature of Ricoh’s quarterly and annual reports to investors over the past few years.
Overall, Ricoh otherwise reported results that were somewhat mixed for the 3rd Quarter of Fiscal 2024, which covered October to December of 2023. Office services sales were up; the thermal printer business continued to miss targets because of weak demand in the US and Europe.
“Operating income has been revised downward to 60 billion yen…it will not be possible to make up for the shortfall in production revenue in the first half,” Ricoh reported to investors.
That means that the stronger financial performance of the 3rd quarter and projected for the 4th quarter will not be enough to make up for the weak results of the first two quarters.
The overall Ricoh conglomerate has struggled with weak sales of office machines and services since the much of the workforce stopped going to the office during the pandemic. And while the pandemic is over, the workforce has not returned to the office; occupancy remains considerably below pre-pandemic levels.
But for the last two years Ricoh has consistently pointed to camera sales as a bright spot for growth and profitability. When Ricoh reported its results for Fiscal 2023, which ended March 31, 2023, the company said annual operating profits soared 97 percent, in part driven by “ongoing profitability of camera business.” The company singled out cameras as a fiscal bright spot in the Other category. (Ricoh does not break out camera sales.)
The category “significantly increased revenues and earnings from PFU consolidation and ongoing profitability of camera business. (In 2022 Ricoh acquired PFU Limited, a consolidated subsidiary of Fujitsu Limited that specialized in document scanning.)
Ricoh has continued to single out camera sales revenue and profitability growth in reports to investors, with the Feb. 6 report that “The camera business remained strong and sales increased” being the latest.
It’s important to remember that Ricoh is issuing that number as guidance to investors. Companies tend to be very conservative about such guidance because they can be criminally prosecuted and sued if they are wrong. For example, the US Securities and Exchange Commission went after Elon Musk and investors filed a class action suit after his 2028 tweet that he had “secured funding” for his Tesla electric car company.
2023 was a very good year for Pentax and Pentaxians
And a great year for Pentax Forums!
By cjfeola in Photo Industry News on Feb 4, 2024
For Ricoh Imaging and Pentax, 2023 was a very good year. And that made it a very good year for Pentaxians and Pentax Forums.
Parent Ricoh Company repeatedly cited the Ricoh Imaging division’s camera business as a profitability bright spot in an otherwise tough time for the office products and imaging giant. The shock spring release of the Pentax K-3 III Monochrome generated an avalanche of press and the better part of a year of back-orders, capped off by the Monochrome being selected as Japan Historical Camera of 2023 by the Japan Camera Foundation.
Pentax K-3 III Monochrome
The Ricoh GRIII, meanwhile, also managed to sell as fast as Ricoh Imaging could make them. Indeed, when Japan’s giant Yodobashi Camera Store — similar to B&H Foto & Electronics and Adorama in the United States – listed its Top 10 Best Selling Compact Cameras last month, the Ricoh GRIIIx Urban Edition was number 9, the Ricoh GRIII was number 6, and the Ricoh GRIIIx was number 1. And on fellow Japanese giant Mapcamera's December best sellers list, the GR IIIx was third, behind the Sony a7c II and the Nikon Zf.
Besides the Monochrome, Ricoh Imaging/Pentax introduced the Pentax-FA 50mm F1.4 Classic, the HD Pentax-FA 50mm F1.4, the K-3 III Monochrome Matte Black Edition and the GR III Diary Edition. They also became the official US Kenko distributor, announced the Pentax WG-90 tough compact camera would ship in 2024, and gave more details on the Pentax Film Project. And the company kicked off 2024 with the unveiling of the finished Pentax Film Project prototype, announcing that they intended to have it on sale soon.
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Christopher J Feola's unfinished autobiography is entitled Things I did While Planning to do Completely Different Things. He has accidentally or serendipitously been Banned from the Pacific Rim, taught at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism before receiving his B.S., and been granted four patents in data architecture, none of which made good use - any use, really - of his major in Theatre or his minor in Modern Dance. He serendipitously became a photojournalist when his first editor handed him a Pentax ME and said Reporters have to take pictures. He was the founding director of The Media Center at the American Press Institute, and taught at the graduate level at Columbia and Indiana universities, among others. Feola was named one of the 50 most influential people in new media by Online Journalism Review, appeared on The News Hour with Jim Lehrer on PBS and Talk of the Nation on NPR, been written up in Business 2.0 and The New York Times; and addressed a joint session of the World Newspaper Congress and the World Editors Forum in Kobe, Japan. He worked at seven papers in 18 states and five countries on a couple of continents, including a two-year stint covering Asia as a foreign correspondent for Pacific Stars & Stripes. He has more than 4,000 published articles and 6,000 published photos to his credit, and his photos on Google Maps have racked up 35 million views, which is in the top 100 worldwide. He is the founding partner of The PrivacyChain, where he is surprised by Web3 on a daily basis. 