Welcome to the 531st edition of Picture of the Week (POTW), covering 31 December 2018 to 13 January 2019. For this weeks POTW, we are (still) calling it "NEW YEAR EDITION" and you are invited to submit all things related to New Year celebrations and the holiday season.

I take this opportunity to wish all Pentaxians (and visitors) a very Blessed 2019, filled with all things good! Hope you and yours have a wonderful 2019!

POTW is a great spot to show off six or fewer shots you take or are editing within the thread's date range. In other words, you can post your shots from this week AND last week.

To post your great photos, just hit reply and attach away.

Feel free to start immediately.

Please:

• consider including in your post any special circumstances or tips on technique or equipment which might be interesting to others.

• identify your camera and lens if that information is easily available to you.

And please invite other Pentaxians to join us.

Some rules:
1) No theme, just post your favorite pix
2) Six or fewer images per person per thread to prevent thread bloat
3) Any Pentax, Ricoh or Samsung camera, film or digital

The current host will invite a new host via Private Message (PM), but if you are interested and willing to host POTW, please send me a PM, before I contact others.

If possible, the new thread will be linked to the previous one. If the thread doesn't start, please contact the host, via PM. Here are the records of recent POTW thread hosts: 390-406 smf, 407-408ramseybuckeye, 409-411 stubyles, 412-423 SD_Bob, 424-427 dave kitson 428-451 smf 452, 453, 454 StephenHampshire 455 Aslyfox, 456 StepehenHampshire, 457-466 noelcmn, 467 Aslyfox, 469-470 aaacb 471 Madmathmind, 472 Madmathmind, 473 Eva, 474 rjbrett, 475 Aslyfox, 476 - 485 noelcmn, 486 - 488 rjbrett, 489 clackers, 490 - 498 rjbrett, 499 StephenHampshire 500 smf, 501 StephenHampshire, 502-505 Eva, 506-525 Vaskebjorn, 526 noelcmn, 527 noelcmn, 528 noelcmn, 529 noelcmn

The series was launched by Peter Zack.

Thanks very much to all hosts and to everyone who contributes images and comments in these threads. And we warmly welcome any new contributions, especially from new joiners.

Read more at: POTW #530 - Period 24 December 2018-6 January 2019 - NEW YEAR EDITION - PentaxForums.com

[noelcmn]

And starting us off once again. Stationery boxes


Playing with light bulbs


Gardeners Chair


And an outing to a local municipal nature reserve produced this




And this, just in case you think we only have ugly insects

[photolady95]

Are you hungry?

A Christmas present from my daughter. Seven layer cookie bars.




And this one I got this morning, when taking the garbage out, i saw him fly over, he landed in our Iron tree. I went inside and grabbed the K-30 mounted 55-300mm WR. Red-Shouldered Hawk



And for the SIC for today: New growth for a almost 60 year old rose bush.

[nosliwmit]

And starting us off once again.

Thanks for starting us off again!

I got in a couple of excursions over the weekend. First was a hike in Pat Sin Leng Country Park on Saturday. It was foggy, so the territorial views for which the hike is known weren't there. I used my DA 35mm Ltd lens with my new K-1 II and got some nice photos. Photos 1, 4, 5 and 6 came from this trip. 4 and 5 were cropped (5 by a large amount!) but 6 is uncropped. You can see the vignetting, but it's not a deal-breaker.

On Sunday I did a Hong Kong walk-around. Photos 2 and 3 were taken with my F 50 1.4, which may find new life as a walk-around lens. It was a little too telephoto on APS-C. #2 is a common sight in HK. Older men and women collecting cardboard and other materials and wheeling them down the road in competition with taxis, double-deckers etc. #3 is an old neon sign, for which Hong Kong was once quite famous. Neon is quickly being replaced by LED, which is more energy efficient, less expensive etc., but also less "cool."

Have a great week!

Attached Images

           

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Last edited by nosliwmit; 01-07-2019 at 10:19 PM.

[aaacb]

Not many photos to show this week either, mostly I shot on film. These are from a hike (k3ii, 16-85)

Flat gray sky the entire day ...





... that ended with a beautiful and dramatic sunset that lit all the snow, too bad I couldn't find a decent subject and composition

[photolady95]

Another one from today; I went out looking for birds, but they were in absentee. So I found these Hibiscus the city planted but the flowers were starting to wilt, so I took a shot of a bud instead. Wind was blowing pretty hard so it's not in tack sharp focus either.

[rjbrett]

Thanks Noel for hosting! I haven't been taking many photos over recent months but took a few over xmas, and have just gotten to the processing.

The first two are of new shoots on a Banksia, with the vibrant color exaggerated by the pre-dawn and then early light, and taken with my K5 & a Cosina Cosinon 50mm f1.8. The Green Jumping Spider was taken using a Super-Multi-Coated Macro-Takumar 50mm f4 and heavily cropped, and the Ixora and Poinciana fflowers a Super Takumar 135 mm f3.5, with an 11mm ext tube for the Ixora. The Poinciana flowers were taking walking home just on dusk.

The Gardenia flower (prostrate form) was taken using a relatively new arrival, a PZO Amar 10.5cm enlarging lens. I don't have a focusing helicoid yet but can do a close normal distance on 60mm worth of ext tubes. I have softened some of the in focus detail in this photo, and added some grain, in Topaz B&W effects trying to emulate the characteristics of 19th century contact prints such as calotypes. Coming to the end of the processing and checking examples of these types of prints online, however, I noticed that bokeh didn't feature heavily in the pictures they were taking then, most examples are of landscape, architectural, and portrait subjects, and they may not have had too much in the way of close focussing lenses ...... . Never mind. I'll also post an unsoftened color version of this in the in-between flower thread.

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Last edited by rjbrett; 01-10-2019 at 04:31 PM.

[bigoak]

Chicago