I just recently joined the Pentax family. My K100D with kit lens arrived this past Thursday (1/31). I've been spending the last few days getting used to using a SLR again. It's been a loooong time since I've used anything other than a Point & Shoot camera.

I've never really taken bird pics but I caught this guy hanging out in a tree in my backyard yesterday morning. I think it's just a drab looking sparrow, but he was a good guinea pig for some of my early shots with this lens/camera combo. These are jpegs straight from the camera with no PP at all. I'm pretty satisfied with the way they came out. Lens is a Quantaray 70-300mm that I picked up before I even had the camera. It's a rebadged (non-APO Sigma). All pics were taken at either F8 or F11. The exif data should still be intact.

160mm



300mm






100% crop of the last pic

[Peter Zack]

Those 2nd and 3rd shots turned out very good ( esp the 3rd). Any practice shooting wildlife is good and the DSLR makes it that much cheaper and a faster learning curve. Plus once in awhile you get some great keepers like these 2. I'd probably check the WB and add a little contrast or levels to these and store them in the "good file" .

The lens is doing fine as well. The 100% crop holds up fairly well. Now turn off the Jpeg unless the card's getting full and shoot RAW!

[codiac2600]

Wonderful shots and welcome back to SLR photography! Hope to see more of your work as you get back into the groove of things.

[maxwell1295]

Those 2nd and 3rd shots turned out very good ( esp the 3rd). Any practice shooting wildlife is good and the DSLR makes it that much cheaper and a faster learning curve. Plus once in awhile you get some great keepers like these 2. I'd probably check the WB and add a little contrast or levels to these and store them in the "good file" .

The lens is doing fine as well. The 100% crop holds up fairly well. Now turn off the Jpeg unless the card's getting full and shoot RAW!

I'm going to have to be content with the jpegs for now.....at least until I feel comfortable enough to start messing with the RAW images. When I say I have no PP experience, I mean absolutely ZERO PP experience. Unless you count sharpening and color tweaking in irfanview as PP. That's the extent of my PP expertise, but I plan on messing around with the GIMP in the very near future. It all depends on my learning curve.

[SpecialK]

I'm going to have to be content with the jpegs for now.....at least until I feel comfortable enough to start messing with the RAW images. When I say I have no PP experience, I mean absolutely ZERO PP experience. Unless you count sharpening and color tweaking in irfanview as PP. That's the extent of my PP expertise, but I plan on messing around with the GIMP in the very near future. It all depends on my learning curve.

Pentax Photo Browser/Photo Lab is a bit clunky but it does everything I need (except occasional dust-spotting). I'm not a manipulator with PP.

You can process a RAW batch with just a few clicks, then "tweak" the particular ones that need it. With my Sigma 70-300, I bump up the contrast to +3 normally to improve the IQ, otherwise the results are pretty flat and lifeless. Your Tamron/Sigma seem pretty good, though.