[kuau]

Besides the obvious, FA31MM Limited,

What other top performers work with the IIs?

Not sure what is better the 70mm DA limited or the 77mm FA Limited,

I live at F5,6-F8

Thanks

[JinDesu]

Pentax DA 100 F2.8 WR Macro

[SpecialK]

I'd think it depends on what you like to shoot and how much money you want to spend.

[kuau]

Landscape, a lot at infinity. looking for best corner performance.

[Trapezoid645]

Between 70 and 77, definitely 77 for your landscape. It's sharper. But 70 appears better for some nice portrait. Done that, not just read it on a blog...

[Adam]

Besides the obvious, FA31MM Limited,

What other top performers work with the IIs?

Not sure what is better the 70mm DA limited or the 77mm FA Limited,

I live at F5,6-F8

Thanks

Any modern prime will work well, though you're going to want to shoot faster than F5.6 to really take advantage of your K-5 IIs's filterless sensor.

Definitely get the FA 77mm. I would also say go for the 15mm F4 because it's awesome (and on special for $539 right now).

[Ferdinand]

Tamron 17-50 for landscape and general use.

[Ferdinand]

I do not think that 70 and 77mm is ideal for landscape...

[neil]

I do not think that 70 and 77mm is ideal for landscape...

Why not? I use my 100mm WR for landscape a lot...

[Ferdinand]

I also use it sometimes with great results, but I still think that the bread and butter tool of a landscaper is a wide angle lens.

[rawr]

Have a look at the DAL 35 /2.4. It is cheap, a good focal length for outdoors, VERY sharp in the centre at f5.6, and very decent at the edges too.

[neil]

I also use it sometimes with great results, but I still think that the bread and butter tool of a landscaper is a wide angle lens.

Damn, I wish someone told me that, my widest lens is 25mm and half of what I shoot is landscape.

[interested_observer]

You can use any lens or focal length for landscape photography. Going from wide angle to telephoto, does provide a difference in perspective, but it also does something else. The wider angle (shorter focal lengths) brings in more foreground into the picture (pushes the landscape further into the background), while the longer focal lengths shoot over the foreground (excluding it) and emphasizes the background landscape - essentially pulls it in. So there are two distinctive styles of landscape photography right there.

I don't know if there is a "best" focal length for landscapes, or cityscapes - but its been observed quite a bit that the most popular focal lengths by professional (commercial) landscape photographers is in the mid 20's to mid 30's - or think around 28mm give or take a few mm. The reason why is distortion - or lack of distortion. 28s tend to be sufficiently wide (especially for full frame sensors) with out having to deal with the distortion that wider angle lenses bring to the table.

There are times that you want to go wider, however you do not want to deal with the distortion of wide angle lens. The solution here is to stitch. With stitching you can go as wide as desired, while not having to deal with distortions (specifically lens distortion). Another aspect of stitching is the addition of pixels to the scene. Stitching involves "stitching" several images together to form a single resulting image, with the resulting image being larger (in the number of pixels) than any one of the individual contributing images. Compare this against with the use of a wide angle lens for the same scene. The wide angle lens is going to "distort" the image of the scene, in pulling more scene in to the available pixel space. To put it another way, with a wide angle lens, each individual pixel will need to represent a larger area of the actual scene. With a longer lens, each pixel will represent a smaller amount of the overall scene, hence the more telephoto image will appear sharper with better resolution. Now to be fair, there are scenes that stitching just will not work, in particular scenes where things are moving.

An aspect that I have not touched on yet, is the sensor. The K5 / K5IIs has a wonderful sensor with additional sharpness with out the AA filter. So the better the lens you use the better the image. The K5's sensor has the same pixel pitch and density as the Nikon D800/e and the Luminous Landscaper noted this, that Nikon recommended the use of their best glass in order to bring out the best in the sensor. The same would go for the K5IIs....

• Nikon-D800-or-D800e

In your post, you addressed corner sharpness of a lens. There are a couple of ways to address this. The first one is obvious, and that is to go find the best lens available with emphasis on corners. They tend to be expensive. Another approach is to use the combination of the K5's cropped sensor and a full frame lens. With a full frame lens, the image circle projected on the sensor is larger. That coupled with a smaller sensor, results in the lenses center falling on the cropped sensor. The result is shooting more through the center of the lens, and not the corners. So, in this respect, looking for and using older full frame lenses has a two fold advantage - using the higher IQ quality of the center of the lens, and the older lenses tend to be a bit cheaper.

An example of this is the 28mm lens. You can get a run of the mill 28 for $20. You can also find very good quality K, M, A and FA 28's anywhere from $60 to $250. Staying with the older lens concept, Carl Zeiss created the Contax line of cameras and lenses that are now discontinued. The lenses are superb and can be remounted to the Pentax K mount for 1/3 to 1/2 the cost of the Pentax 31 Ltd. I just walked through the lens database a bit selecting the older 28 to 35mm, 9+ rated lenses across the K, M, A, F older models as a sample. There is a lot out there....

• Vivitar 28mm F2.0 MC Close Focus Wide Angle "A" series Lens Reviews - Vivitar Lenses - Pentax Lens Review Database
• SMC Pentax-F 28mm F2.8 Reviews - F Prime Lenses - Pentax Lens Reviews & Lens Database
• SMC Pentax-A 28mm F2 Reviews - A Prime Lenses - Pentax Lens Reviews & Lens Database
• SMC Pentax 35mm F3.5 Reviews - K Prime Lenses - Pentax Lens Reviews & Lens Database
• SMC Pentax 30mm F2.8 Reviews - K Prime Lenses - Pentax Lens Reviews & Lens Database
• SMC Pentax 28mm F2 Reviews - K Prime Lenses - Pentax Lens Reviews & Lens Database
• SMC Pentax 20mm F4 Reviews - K Prime Lenses - Pentax Lens Reviews & Lens Database
• SMC Pentax-M 28mm F2 Reviews - M Prime Lenses - Pentax Lens Reviews & Lens Database
• Carl Zeiss 28mm F2.8 Distagon T* Lens Reviews - Carl Zeiss Lenses - Pentax Lens Review Database

• https://www.pentaxforums.com/forums/pentax-slr-lens-discussion/154533-shootou...teds-peer.html

When talking about landscape lenses, the one aspect that really does not come up is auto focusing. For the most part you are going to be at infinity, things are not moving, auto focusing is not necessary, and a manual focus lens really has few disadvantages. The only disadvantage with a K or M lens is the reporting of aperture. They will just default to a static reporting of f2.8 in the EXIF meta data.

In the end, the only thing that matters is what you want to do, and how you shoot, along with what lens appeals to you - and your checkbook (or your spouse's tolerance to your hobby).

[Ferdinand]

Very well explained by interested observer!
Btw, a further advantage of wider lenses is that you can get much more Dof.
I like the Tamron 17-50 for landscape because it is optically very strong (sharp corner to corner with good contrast) and one can play with a range of focal length without carrying 3-4 primes. The small barrel distortion at the wide end one can correct with a click of a button with programs like DXO.

I tried stitching too, but I preferred the images taken with the wide angle. The perspective and the relative size of things at different distances are different in a real wide angle and a stitched scene.

[interested_observer]

And Ferdinand brought another couple of items to mind. Wide angle lenses just through their physics have a deeper depth of field that is inherent within their design. That can be very helpful in landscapes. Another aspect is that with wide angle lenses, since the field of view is wider, they naturally tend to bring in more apparent light for a given aperture. What I mean by this, is that the images tend to be brighter a longer focal length lens at the same aperture. Longer focal length lenses have a smaller field of view, thus by their very design limit the field of view - also limiting the amount of light pulled in.

Going back to best lens for landscape, I'll toss in a few more thoughts - that also go back to the earlier Contax comments. Contax (or rather Zeiss) had a couple of zooms that were as sharp and high in image quality as any prime. The Contax 28-70 and 28-85. Both of these are essentially 2 of the 3 zooms that their mounts can be modified to the Pentax K mount using Leitax.com parts.

• Zeiss Contax lens for Pentax cameras

I also ran across this link that compared a number of Pentax lenses, that I think might apply here. They use the K20, so the K5 would be just that much better. Its in French so Google Translate or Babble Fish would be useful.

• Comparo 24mm Pentax
• Test des 15mm Pentax