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06-13-2008, 12:55 AM   #1
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Pentax 55-300. Why is it that...

... I always have such lousy timing?

So I'm heading out the door today to go to the handgun range and do my weekly skills and drills workout. Stuff in both hands, out the door, and there's a box sitting in the deck. Oh well, just some more puppy stuff for the wife - she's spent more on our new Griff puppy than normal folks spend on a new kid. So off I go. Great day at the range, spent half an hour just watching a badger out for a stroll on the range with her kits, teaching them how to hunt gophers I think.

Get back later - in the dark - and my wife says "The box is for Pegasus Geomatics, so it must be for you". No "from" on the outside - big deal, work stuff. More chitchat ensues, guns need cleaning, blah, blah, blah. So anyways it's now past midnight, I'm off to bed, and I decide to see what's in the box on the way.

Well it ain't work stuff. It's MY NEW 55-300. And a Sto-Fen flash disperser. And a new 8 GB card. Damn! I would have taken it out to the range with me - and probably gotten some great pictures of the badgers. Damn, damn, damn...

And of course, it is dark. And I have no batteries charged up for the flash. I could wait until morning to try the lens out... but no, get in the truck, drive into town to the convenience store, buy some batteries, back home we go. Now what do I take pictures of - it now being really late?

Aha! The puppy! So in I go, cruel SOB that I am, and get Kirin The Little Beer Dog out of her bed. She is not happy with me... Nonetheless, with sufficient inducements of slices of hot dog (pure beef only, of course), she wakes up enough to have her eyes open and look my way when I whistler at her.

And with all of that - finally, late - I get my very first picture with my new 55-300 and using my Sto-Fen too boot.

Ladies and gentlemen: my first pic with the Pentax 55-300, modelling courtesy of Kiren The Little Beer Dog. I think I'm gonna love this lens:

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06-13-2008, 01:51 AM   #2
Syb
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Can't wait to see more shots! Looks like a fine lens.

When we get a parcel in da house, we always first open it and then determine who it was meant for.

Sometimes it is the neighbours.

06-13-2008, 04:48 AM   #3
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Ooh, I like that - rip it open first and ask questions later...
06-13-2008, 05:16 AM   #4
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Three things I can think of here.

First. I never, ever leave a package unopened unless I know for sure where it came from and what's in it.

Second. Congrats on getting a great new lens. I sure do enjoy mine.

Third. If you ever decide to caption that photo.....


"Are we done yet?"

Would be a perfect fit.

Ed

06-13-2008, 06:59 AM   #5
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Wooo hooo! Have fun with the new lens. The combo worked great. It looks like a daytime picture. The lighting is great!

Terri
06-13-2008, 09:38 AM   #6
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I'd like to say more about the lens but the weather here is still DS - we had three inches of snow two days ago and about the only improvement is the change to rain. Gardens dead, fruit tree flowers are toast so probably no fruit this year, the hen turkey walking around this morning had nine chicks a few days ago and none with her now, etc. Anyways, the weather isn't particularly accomodating for checking out the new lens - I had kind of hoped to go up into Glacier today if the weather would have cooperated, and now as it is I'm headed back to the money patch tonight or tomorrow. It's so flat and featureless there that you can watch your dog running away for three days. I did watch a couple of antelope does kicking the crap out of a coyote who was nosing around trying to find their fawns a few weeks ago, however - he was in the hurt locker. This lens would have been ideal for capturing that.

I understand what you mean about the parcels, but you have to understand that we run our business out of our house and between business and stuff sent here for friends, we probably average about three a day. 99% of which have real exciting things inside them like photocopies of surveys, DVD's with satellite imagery on them, a replacement cord for a GPS, etc, or aren't ours to open to begin with. So unless we're expecting toys, packages from UPS and FedEx and so on just sort of pile up until the end of the day. I figured my lens would be another week, anyways.

The Sto-Fen did do a good job there; I messed around with it some using my 17-70 this morning and found pics overexposed when I thought it would tone them down somewhat. I don't know much about flash as I don't use it often, but I bought the 540FGZ and now this to learn more about flash and try and try and improve my pics where including flash would help the lighting. So I guess I need a few sessions of just flash experimentation, with and without the diffuser and playing with the flash settings and bounce flash. Once I get a handle on that I'll move to experimenting with remote flash - although I can't see using that out in the bush too often.

And Ed, you get the honours: it'll be "Are We Done Yet". Kiren The Little Beer Dog got her revenge by jumping in my face at 0600 H. this morning. Turnabout is fair play, I guess.
06-13-2008, 10:14 AM   #7
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What a hilarious story! You have good storytelling ability. Sounds like you are in the petroleum exploration business. We can use a new find or two. You live in a beautiful part of the country and must be asking yourself about the validity of these 'global warming' claims.

Looks like a good lens. It is almost up to the top of my wish list. Just waiting for more availability.

06-13-2008, 01:00 PM   #8
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QuoteOriginally posted by volosong Quote
What a hilarious story! You have good storytelling ability. Sounds like you are in the petroleum exploration business.
I just type really, really fast, so it just comes out like I was talking.

No, I'm a GIS analyst now, although still cling to my cop/military roots as a part time soldier in the army. So I do things like you might see in Google Earth i.e. GPS surveys, precision installation of survey monuments, map making, slope/soil stability analysis, blah, blah, blah. And by choice I've specialized in non-urban work; meaning I look for contracts with the mining exploration and forest industries because that lands me in the mountains. Other GIS types like to stick to the cities doing cadastral work, network analysis for traffic and public transit, etc. The current work in the money patch is kind of an accident, and being stuck out on the bald ass prairie is pretty boring stuff even if the money is good. Hopefully, the contracts I'm working on in Argentina will come through - working in Pategonia and getting in a little flyfishing on the side would be great.

QuoteQuote:
We can use a new find or two.
I'm no authority, but I kind of suspect we've already hit Peak Oil and it isn't going to be a lot of fun here on out. Consider too that China is expected to surpass the US in oil consumption in the next five years and India is not far behind - meanwhile, US consumption is still increasing 16% a year if I remember correctly. Anyways, I can't help out as I don't find the stuff, I just map the infrastructure once the industry has it in place.

QuoteQuote:
You live in a beautiful part of the country and must be asking yourself about the validity of these 'global warming' claims.
Yeah, I'm pretty sceptical, but more from my science background and from what I see of it from a GIS perspective than anything else. Reducing our energy usage and pollution can only be good no matter what you believe, but the route we're on is kind of doubtful for me - especially if we're actually headed into a global cooling stage. Either way, I don't get too wrapped around the axle about it, as I'll be taking the long dirt nap under blue Montana skis before this ever gets resolved or proven one way or another. The wife and I just try to live a frugal lifestyle as far as our impact on where we live, and don't worry about the rest of it.

QuoteQuote:
Looks like a good lens. It is almost up to the top of my wish list. Just waiting for more availability.
More availability??? I thought I just saw Adorama had them available for $340 or something like that. I got my lens within about ten days of ordering, I think, even though they said it was on backorder.

You can't wait ten days instead of three to five?

Anyways, when the weather clears up so I can see something in the viewfinder besides rain going past sideways, and I get out of the money patch for some time off, I think I'm going to really enjoy this lens. I could lend it to you until I got back home if you lived next door...

Speaking of the money patch, I better get back to packing for the trip back to work.
06-13-2008, 01:23 PM   #9
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Small world! Not only are we both Pentaxians, but we do some of the same "stuff". One of the things I do at my mortgage paying job is research with the application of satellite imagery to the study of the earth's renewable and non-renewable resources. For fun, I teach the "Map Interpretation and GPS" class (among others) at the local community college. I should rephrase that, I don't have a job...I get paid for a hobby.

A bunch of years ago we did some research in the Wind River Basin and the Owl Creek Mountains (central Wyoming). Fell in love with the place. If it wasn't for the winters, (and having a wife), I'd move there.
06-13-2008, 01:52 PM   #10
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Quick note on field test of the Pentax 55-300:

The lens shade functions admirably in protecting the front lens from eager, jabbing puppy noses that are inquisitive about The Big Eye... Didn't leave a mark. Now if her tongue had been deployed at the same time... I'm not so sure.

Pentax... they think of everything!
06-13-2008, 01:56 PM   #11
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QuoteOriginally posted by volosong Quote
Small world! Not only are we both Pentaxians, but we do some of the same "stuff". One of the things I do at my mortgage paying job is research with the application of satellite imagery to the study of the earth's renewable and non-renewable resources.
I'd like to know more about that as I do a little bit of the same, although not much - resolution from Landsat, SPOT, and India isn't good enough for our purposes, Quickbird isn't really useful for what we're looking for, and Radarsat... well, sometimes. Mostly orthophotos and LIDAR for us.

If you're doing anything with the hyperspectral SV's that are starting to show up, I'd really like to know more.

Here's a fantasy: a Kx0d that could be switched over into hyperspectral mode... 256 EMR bands to choose from... wow.

I really got to get packing.
06-13-2008, 02:46 PM   #12
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Nice shot, and beautiful story with it. Sometimes it just happens, that we think, and then....
Oh, Heureka....

I hope we'll see many more pics...
06-13-2008, 04:47 PM   #13
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QuoteOriginally posted by axl Quote
Nice shot, and beautiful story with it. Sometimes it just happens, that we think, and then....
Oh, Heureka....

I hope we'll see many more pics...
It stopped raining for a bit and the sun blessed us for a couple of hours. Here's a couple before it started raining again. I don't know how to pick images for lens assessment - I shouldn't be mucking around here so I just hucked these out in Picasa and then cropped them with Photoshop (meaning I did the lossy JPEG thing twice, I suppose). I do know what I'm looking at here in the message preview mode doesn't seem to be nearly as sharp nor with as much pop as when I look at RAW's of these pics. It's really noticeable on the fiber sticking up on the wood in the one photo - really sharp and detailed in the RAW, pretty blurry in these. Probably avoidable if I did a proper conversion.

There's also a good chance at least some detected softness is me - I took the camera along on a quick spin on my mountain bike to get some exercise, so I was huffing and puffing a bit when I took these. Out of about 20 shots, these were the only two that weren't so blurry that I just chucked them out.

More exercise and less computing time required...

Just looking at the attachments thing here... I think it would be kind of nice to attach GPS files and Google Earth files, for pointers to where pics were taken. Doesn't look like that's in the menu at the moment.
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06-13-2008, 09:48 PM   #14
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One more...

I think resizing down to the maximum size for attachments is what is kicking the crap out of image clarity:
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06-13-2008, 11:38 PM   #15
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QuoteOriginally posted by Rick Quote
I'd like to know more about that as I do a little bit of the same, although not much - resolution from Landsat, SPOT, and India isn't good enough for our purposes, Quickbird isn't really useful for what we're looking for, and Radarsat... well, sometimes. Mostly orthophotos and LIDAR for us.

If you're doing anything with the hyperspectral SV's that are starting to show up, I'd really like to know more.

Here's a fantasy: a Kx0d that could be switched over into hyperspectral mode... 256 EMR bands to choose from... wow.

I really got to get packing.
Now that is interesting, I'd like a hyperspectral Pentax, AND a 55-300, as, like you guys, I work in GIS in particular a combination of landscape fire modeling ( heaps of field work) and marine habitat modeling.

Now about posting image locations online, how about we have a chat about this by either pm or on a new thread. What do you think?

Dale

Last edited by Dale; 06-13-2008 at 11:41 PM. Reason: Punctuation?
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