[pepperberry farm]

sunset last night was amazing







(CZJ MC Flektogon 35mm f2.4)

[ramseybuckeye]

This was shot at 40 with the DA20-40 Ltd on KP

[pepperberry farm]

(CZJ MC Flektogon 35/2.4)

[djb47]

(CZJ MC Flektogon 35/2.4)

So what's for dessert????

[pepperberry farm]

So what's for dessert????

come back for Father's Day and there will be a triple-chocolate cake....

[ChristianRock]

Normal is hard. When in doubt--bokeh!
(K35/3.5 probably at 3.5)

Normal is hard, but it's so rewarding when you get it right!

Nice bokeh on that 35 3.5!

(Sigma 28mm f1.8 EX DG - the only 28mm lens in the house)

Have you tried the K or M 28 3.5? Very nice bold colors and great sharpness on those... I have the M and it's a cracker, the K is supposed to be even better...

Today was a garden day, needed to clean and repair some things. Took a moment to shoot this Triss Merigold Without postprocessing, I dont want to risk it on workstation laptop without any calibration.



And a rosy company:




Lens: smc Pentax 35mm f2.4 DA SMC AL

The Plastic Fantastic surprises with some really nice bokeh sometimes, doesn't it?
This lens is so under-rated. I have bought the 35 Limited recently and I might just not be knowledgeable enough or have good enough photographic appreciation to realize that the Limited is better - and I will give it time to get to know it - but at this point I don't think the 35 2.4 is inferior in terms of image quality. Different, yes - the 35 Limited is better for textures and bold colors and of course it does macro, but the DA 35 2.4 seems better for skin tones and things like moving water and for yellow/orange tones... both are super sharp... for now I'm keeping both...

[jersey]

Yes, it is nice lens. And sooo light, it is great to carry around. And image quality - not as nice as my old Helios 53mm on Zenit XP, but still great lens. Bought it instead of limited when I was short on money and wanted to supplement kit lens with a light prime for indoor shooting. Never regretted it.

[jersey]

Todays shot, it's from military cemetery of Russian soliders that died during liberation (well, let's say it was one ) of Grudziadz from German occupation. Fixed white balance and composition as cemetery is closed and I needed to shot from behind a fence.



Lens: smc Pentax 35mm f2.4 DA SMC AL

[aslyfox]

truth in advertising

and the beginning

the current spoiled rotten dog ( and future chew toy ?? )

K 3 II + SMC Pentax DA 35mm F2.8 Macro Limited

[pepperberry farm]

(CZJ MC Flektogon 35mm f2.4)

[pepperberry farm]

Have you tried the K or M 28 3.5? Very nice bold colors and great sharpness on those... I have the M and it's a cracker, the K is supposed to be even better...

the lens' color or sharpness isn't the issue - I just don't care for the focal length...

that's the biggest reason against the 30mm lenses that I have - just too close to 28mm...

[Sir Nameless]

Last week, I went looking for some knowledge upgrades on shooting with a normal lens. The limited web searching I did mostly yielded piles of rather superficial articles about how everyone should own a normal lens because they're so cheap and fast and sharp (assuming, as the authors generally do, that you shoot full frame). But I did find this article interesting: composing to make your normal act like a long-wide or short-tele:

The Lowly Normal Lens : Michael Frye Photography

(I found other articles on his site worth the time to read as well).

So, with an hour to occupy and a historic burial ground in the vicinity, I set out to see what I could do. Here are the parameters of the experiment: Try to make some images that have a wider than normal and narrower than normal feel to them using composition alone. No cropping. Everything shot at f/8. My thoughts going in:
- To make it feel wide, include more background. Tilt the camera so that the plane of focus is not parallel to the subject (exaggerate keystoning). Shoot down into a scene from an elevated position.
- To make it feel tighter, exclude background. Get level and square with the subject. Have out-of-focus items in front of the subject.

Other things one could do (not part of my experiment that day):
- Shoot 'wide' shots with narrow apertures, and 'long' shots with open apertures.
- In post, add barrel distortion to 'wide' shots, while correcting barrel in 'long' shots.
- In post, exaggerate perspective distortion in wide shots, while correcting it in 'long' shots.
- In post, crop 'long' shots to narrow perspective and exclude background details. (OK, this is pretty obvious, but including for completeness' sake.)


In practice, I thought it was much easier to get a wide feel than a narrow feel, which is funny considering the lens I used is on the long side of normal for APS-C. That's why there are more 'wide' examples below than tele. Most of the 'tele' ones I tried just ended up looking normal.

Here are some examples, all shot with the K35 at f/8 on APS-C (K-50):

1. Wide attempt, looking down into the scene from an elevated position:




2. Wide attempt, getting close to exaggerate perspective distortion in the horizontal direction:




3. Wide attempt, getting close to exaggerate perspective distortion in the vertical direction:




4. The following two are the same subject, and I was attempting to get one (the first) to feel wider, and the other (the second) to feel tighter. Really all I did was hold the camera in a near-standing position for the first and crouching down low for the second:








I'd love to hear your thoughts on this. What do you think of the results of this experiment? Do any of the so-called wide shots feel wider than normal to you? Did the last one feel like a short tele to you? Or do they all look normal?

[ChristianRock]

Last week, I went looking for some knowledge upgrades on shooting with a normal lens. The limited web searching I did mostly yielded piles of rather superficial articles about how everyone should own a normal lens because they're so cheap and fast and sharp (assuming, as the authors generally do, that you shoot full frame). But I did find this article interesting: composing to make your normal act like a long-wide or short-tele:

The Lowly Normal Lens : Michael Frye Photography

That's an interesting article.

My point of reference has always been Henri Cartier Bresson's point of view of a painter and the natural, undistorted perspective that the normal FOV provides. When I look at it from that perspective (the lack of distortion or telephoto effect) your pictures all look like a normal lens to me But others might disagree.

Here's the quote from Bresson to the New York Times (I've seen him mentioning this in I think one other interview as well, but not being quite as polite about the 35mm FOV):

Q. Why the 50-millimeter lens?

A. It corresponds to a certain vision and at the same time has enough depth of focus, a thing you don’t have in longer lenses. I worked with a 90. It cuts much of the foreground if you take a landscape, but if people are running at you, there is no depth of focus. The 35 is splendid when needed, but extremely difficult to use if you want precision in composition. There are too many elements, and something is always in the wrong place. It is a beautiful lens at times when needed by what you see. But very often it is used by people who want to shout. Because you have a distortion, you have somebody in the foreground and it gives an effect. But I don’t like effects. There is something aggressive, and I don’t like that. Because when you shout, it is usually because you are short of arguments.

[ChristianRock]

And here's some more pictures with the Sigma 30 1.4, from our drive up to the Blue Ridge mountains between Georgia and North Carolina.

[pepperberry farm]

(CZJ MC Flektogon 35/2.4)