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02-08-2017, 08:03 AM - 15 Likes   #1
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First 24 Hours with a K-1

Hi all. Finally succumbed to the K-1 temptation, bought one locally in Adelaide and collected it earlier this week.

Sort of ironic that it's taken this long: I was probably one of the first few Forum members to have one in my hands to play with. I happened to be in Tokyo last year on holidays a few days before the official K-1 release and called in on the official Ricoh Imaging store in Shinjuku. They had a K-1 available on display and demonstration. They would have sold one to me as well but I was paying for a family of four to be on this holiday and decided my credit card probably didn't need the additional stress!

Took the K-1 out the first evening down to a local beach to have a play. Just threw in a battery from my K-3 as I was too impatient to wait for the new K-1 battery to charge up.

The hard question was what lens to use. I decided on the FA31 as I had earlier come to the conclusion that the APS-C format probably robbed this lens of its essential character more than many of my other lenses. And it should make use of all of the K-1's resolving power as well.

Here are some of the initial batch of images. All shot in RAW and subsequently butchered to taste in LR4.



This was taken immediately on arrival. After a rainy couple of days, the evening cloud pattern looked promising for a good sunset. ISO100, 1/20th, F8
First observation was the K-1's exposure algorithms protected the highlights very well. Only the one thin sliver above the sun was burnt out and not really noticeable in the final image.


ISO100, 1/25th, F8. K-1 did a nice job of picking up the pink reflections on the water. Breaking waves in foreground were quite dark but came up easily with the local adjustment tool applying some exposure and highlight lifts.



ISO100, 2.5 sec, F11. Trying to blur the water with a longer exposure but still a little too much light (and I has left my ND filter at home in my excitement to get to the beach). Unfortunately the sunset after the first two images were taken simply fizzled out so all I had then to work with was the afterglow. There is a peninsula of land about 50km out that often gets some cloud sitting on top of it. When the sun drops behind that distant line of cloud, it is blocked from illuminating the underside of closer clouds. Goodbye good sunset when that happens. Few things I noticed from this shot: (1) bringing back some of the shadow detail of the jetty was much easier and a better result than I would have got from the K-3; (2) the LR local adjustment tool auto-masking seems to behave better than with K-3 files - better contrast making boundary definitions more obvious to the masking algorithm maybe? A pleasant surprise. And (3) dynamic range can be a challenge for these afterglow images, the K-1 again did well protecting highlights.



ISO100, 20 sec, F11. Best shot aesthetically for the night. The FA31 does fabulous starbursts (as does the FA77 but not the FA43). Again the shadow detail of the jetty was easy to retrieve. +79 shadow correction on the local adjustment tool but the shadows still remained very clean in terms of noise and blotches. Was just a black outline before the shadows were lifted.



ISO100, 30 sec, F11. The lighting on the jetty was severely yellow but I had to set the overall WB to daylight as scene away from the jetty was naturally lit. Ran the local adjustment tool up and down the jetty deck to locally adjust the white balance to get something close to the natural colour of the bitumen surface. The file responded easily. You can see the uncorrected yellow tint in the hand rails - they were too fiddly to try to adjust. There is a little colour blotch up near the closest pole that I have just noticed - not sure if this was an internal reflection off the sensor onto the FA31 rear element or I just missed a small area painting with the local adjustment tool.



The nearby marina is a bit of a camera torture test. Wide dynamic range, different lighting sources - some with really horrible colour tints. I also need to use a reasonably high ISO even though employing a tripod. The boats subtlety bob up and down even though they look to be still, so exposure times need to be kept moderately short to avoid motion blur.

This image is ISO1600, 1/2 sec, F3.2, -1EV compensation to try to stop the restaurant area lighting to the rear from completely burning out. In post, the whole image was lifted 1.5EV and the boats another 1EV+ using the local adjustment tool. Normally this would be a recipe for a noise disaster but there is very little noise. For for the full res JPEG output simply I applied a bit of sharpening masking plus a tiny bit of NR. The remaining noise is not really noticable. If I was reducing the final JPEG resolution to something screen friendly I probably could have left the NR off and just let the re-sampling down lose the noise. The noise is also much smaller and less grainy than the K-3, less obtrusive and seemingly less accentuated by sharpening or clarity adjustments. In summary - very easy to manage.

Few more from the marina...



ISO1600, 1.3 sec, F3.2. Pushing the exposure time vs the boat bobbing here but got away with it. Lots of heavy local white balance adjustments and a moderate shadow lift on the metal walling on the right. Again pleased at how malleable the RAW files are.



ISO400, 2 sec, F4. The closest boat on the right is suffering from a little motion blur as I wanted to see what sort of file a slightly lower ISO would deliver.

So that was night one with the K-1. It's way too late here now so I'll post some daylight shots from the next day in a separate thread. Those shots (among other things) will explore some of the crazy detail that the K-1 can deliver and where I found some moire creeping into some images.

Overall, very pleased. Files are really good to work with and the noise at ISO1600 even when underexposing is easy to manage.

I use DNG files, not PEF and LR4 is happy to to read the K-1 DNG files (but can't read the K-1 PEF files). It just means with LR4 I am stuck using the embedded camera profile as my only option for the initial rendering. I am in the same position with the K-3. What I have noticed is that the K-1 embedded profile looks to be much better calibrated than the K-3's embedded profile. In my view, the K-1 images before subsequent adjustments start out rendering more pleasingly than than K-3 images. I've grown to not like the K-3 embedded profile. What this means in practice is that it seems quicker to get a nice final image with the K-1 files as I am not fighting to first reverse the deficiencies of a poor embedded camera profile. This observation may or may not be applicable to other brands of RAW converters - I don't have any others loaded on my pc other than the Pentax DCU.

Also have noticed that the process of mirror lift, shutter release and mirror return is really quick and smooth with the K-1. The full push of the shutter release button also seems to take just a little less pressure. Coupled with the camera having more mass, I quickly noticed I seem to be handholding the camera much more steadily. Combined with the better SR, the potential to handhold at low shutter speeds looks very promising. Currently the best I can semi-reliably get away with using the K-3 is somewhere around 1/6 to 1/8th sec so it looks hopeful that this can be bettered with the K-1.

Oh, and I just noticed as I am finishing up that I haven't updated my copyright watermark for the new year. Doh!


Last edited by southlander; 02-08-2017 at 08:40 AM.
02-08-2017, 08:11 AM - 2 Likes   #2
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Very nice write up.
02-08-2017, 08:47 AM - 2 Likes   #3
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well the camera's not wasted on you, I'll say that - very nice set as well as interesting details
02-08-2017, 09:05 AM   #4
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If this is the result of your first outing, I can't wait to see more from you! Congratulations I love my K-1 I think its my favorite full frame body and I have previously owned a Canon 5D, 5D III and 1Dx.

02-08-2017, 10:23 AM   #5
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Great write-up and wonderful photos!
02-08-2017, 12:16 PM   #6
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Congratulations on the photos and the K-1!

Looks like you are getting to grips with it very quickly! I love mine - it was a big step up from the K-5 (which I still have for the time being but have not used it since I have had the K-1).
BTW comparing SR on K-5 to K-1 I think the improvement is quite noticeable as I don't have particularly steady hands but seem to be landing more keepers at low shutter speeds. Sure some of it might be the better grip + mass of the K-1 but even taking that into account I think the SR is doing a great job. Not sure if SR on K-3 was significantly better than K-5 but I guess you will soon find out how SR on the K-1 compares to K-3!
02-08-2017, 03:01 PM   #7
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thx for sharing. impressive 'test' photos..
Looking forward to "your first week with the K1" post :-)

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