[VaSA]

Get K 50mm f1.4 - best 50mm lens by Pentax (in my opinion - I've tried FA 50 1.4, A 50 1.4, K 55 1.8, M/A 50mm 1.7.

[Marc Sabatella]

Note that your shots are a bit underexposed. You should try to expose to the right, raising the ISO if necessary, rather than underexposing.

Or, just increase the brightness in PP. It's *exactly* the same thing as raising the ISO - either way, the sensor collects the exact same number of photos. It's just a question of whether the artificial bump up in gain is performed by the camera or by the PP software. Depending on the particular ISO you are at and wther you shoot JPEG or RAW, there might be a sloght difference between analog and digital amplification, but that's not necessarily an advantage to shooting in camera. On the other hand, actually slowing the shutter speed or providing more light will cause the sensor to collect more photons and thus truly produce a better image as far as noise goes.

[pinholecam]

Flash shots don't not need to look like one.
Neither do they need to be into the eyes (and they are not going to blind the child Will Flash Damage Babies’ Sensitive Young Eyes? | Sublime Light)
Yes, direct ones into the eyes are uncomfortable for anyone even us, so we avoid that.
Using flash does not need to be formal as well.
The flash is just placed off camera to simulate a directional light where a lamp or window would be.
You increase your chances/opportunities with flash.

This was taken on a moody rainy weekend (last Saturday in fact). There just was not enough light being spilled into the area.
Bad weather meant we were not leaving the house (the train service broke down as well.... ) and with the poor light, I'd not be taking any photos at home if I only relied on natural light.
I placed a small white baby mattress upright on the right and the flash in between baby and mattress. The white of the mattress acted as a large bounce. Less than a minute to 'set up'
No posing either, my son just did what he wanted and I took a series of shots as the opportunity arises.






BTW, congrats on the 50/1.7. It should do very well with window light.

[Laurentiu Cristofor]

Or, just increase the brightness in PP. It's *exactly* the same thing as raising the ISO - either way, the sensor collects the exact same number of photos. It's just a question of whether the artificial bump up in gain is performed by the camera or by the PP software. Depending on the particular ISO you are at and wther you shoot JPEG or RAW, there might be a sloght difference between analog and digital amplification, but that's not necessarily an advantage to shooting in camera. On the other hand, actually slowing the shutter speed or providing more light will cause the sensor to collect more photons and thus truly produce a better image as far as noise goes.

If you follow the link I posted for my ETTR tests and you take a look at the 100% crops shown there, you'll see why pushing the exposure in PP is worse than raising the ISO when taking the shot. The pushed ISO 400 shots end up being noisier than the ETTR ISO 800 shots. You can also look at this post in which I inlined the results from my test using the K10D.

[Marc Sabatella]

If that turned out to be true for the specific camera, the specific ISO level, the specific file format, and the specific PP software you happened to have tested, fine - presumably you saw either the difference between the analog amplifier in that camera and the PP software you used, or you saw artifacts of doing this experiment with JPEG rather than RAW (I couldn't view your link in my browser). Anyhow, whether it happened to be true of that particular com i atip. Of variables or not, it's not true in general. There's no getting around physics - collecting X number of photons means the images has at least amount of noise. If you shoot JPEG rather than RAW, then pushing in PP can potentially produce noticeably worse results just on account of the banding that would likely occur from a simple bit shift if that's how your software does it, but shooting RAW would given you more bits to work with and thus show the comparison more accurately.

EDIT: I checked out your link with another browser. I see you are shooting RAW, which is good, but I still don't see what what you're seeing. Whatever small differences might exist in the shots seems entirely attributable to the extra NR performed at higher ISO in camera. And yes, it stands to reason that you'd want to apply a bit more NR if push processing an image, in order to compensate for the NR not performed by the camera. In any case, again, there is no arguing with physics. Assuming the shots had the same aperture and shutter speed, they let in the same amount of light, and hence collected the same number of photons. There is no way one shot should have an advantage over the other once one corrects for the various variables involved.

[Laurentiu Cristofor]

EDIT: I checked out your link with another browser. I see you are shooting RAW, which is good, but I still don't see what what you're seeing. Whatever small differences might exist in the shots seems entirely attributable to the extra NR performed at higher ISO in camera. And yes, it stands to reason that you'd want to apply a bit more NR if push processing an image, in order to compensate for the NR not performed by the camera. In any case, again, there is no arguing with physics. Assuming the shots had the same aperture and shutter speed, they let in the same amount of light, and hence collected the same number of photons. There is no way one shot should have an advantage over the other once one corrects for the various variables involved.

It is true that in the case of the K10D, the results may partially look better because of the extra NR that Pentax cameras do at high ISO (the smoothing mentioned by dxomark) - I actually mentioned this in my comments for those results. However, while the K10D does such smoothing from ISO 800, the K-x only does it beginning from ISO 3200 and I used lower ISOs in my experiment and still saw the same difference. So, even in the absence of NR and smoothing, the ETTR images look slightly better than the pushed ones. You can see this by opening the images in different tabs and then flipping quickly between them - the ETTR ones are smoother in the oof areas, while the pushed ones show coarser grain (not a huge difference by any means, but a difference nevertheless).

I don't know why this happens. I suppose that the software pushing isn't quite the same as increasing the sensor gain, but there may be entirely different factors at play in this, so I'll let the figuring out to others. What I can see is that pushing is a bit worse than getting the exposure right in camera. Anyone can repeat such experiment, see what the results are on their camera, and take an informed decision around this.

[lguckert79]

there is the pentax dal 35mm f2.4 that is better than the kit is way better check it out i have one and love it there is a tone of review's on this lens in the review section here so good luck