Originally posted by makkan Hi,
I'm trying to get the best results from my Soviet era Industar 26m 50mm/2.8 lens on the Pentax Q. I've really tried to get my subjects in sharp focus, but I still end up with unsharp photos. Am I doing it wrong or do I have unrealistic expectations when viewing them at 100 % in Lightroom.
So far I've only shot hand held as well as resting the camera on the padded back of a chair for support. And I think at 1/60 and 1/80 it should be at least a bit crisper than this. But maybe the crop factor making the 50 mm a +300 mm tele comes into play here.
I'd love to hear your suggestions on how to get sharper photos or tell me that I'm too much of a pixel peeper.
Based on my own experience, I have several pieces of advice for you:
(1) don't believe what anyone else tells you {including me, I guess}
(2) learning to use adapted lenses is a slow, tedious process
(3) in most cases, native Q-mount lenses will work better than anything else you get
(4) newer lenses will tend to work better than older lenses
(5) in testing, avoid anything that could degrade the image or otherwise cause problems {for example, in my testing, I attached the flat paper target to a wicker chair; getting the lens in exact focus was easy, because the wicker pattern caused the focus peaking to really "pop"}
(6) a "loupe", such as made by Hoodman, is essential to seeing well enough to manually focus
I won't go through all of my experiences right here, right now - some of them are summarized in an early thread
https://www.pentaxforums.com/forums/136-pentax-q/284804-baby-steps.html
but my summary is that there is no silver bullet that will get you good images quickly.
On page 3 of that thread is summary of some back-yard testing I did using a paper target. In that series of tests, I tried various apertures on three different lenses; I went methodically, and since I analyzed everything only when I was done, I couldn't use earlier steps to skip later steps. I did discover that my older lenses cannot compete with my newer ones. I did discover that my best lens did best around f/8-f/11; the thing people who focus on diffraction don't tell you is that two forces move results in opposite directions - smaller aperture causes diffraction to creep upwards making image worse, but it also causes you to use better-then-better part of the lens making image better.