[zkarj]

Neat vantage point! Well done.

Telephotos do tend to compress perspective a bit, but that really makes the plane look like it's right on top of the people at the beach.

Out around Tahunanui and some of the estuaries around Nelson, the planes get pretty close, but probably not that close.

Mum and Dad live in rural Canterbury, but they're right in the flight path of flights to Australia. During the school holidays, I saw an A380 fly over outbound, and even though it had already been gaining height, it still looked massive. Unfortunately I didn't have my camera handy.

Thanks guys. To be honest, I wasn't intending the beach scene as such, but a couple of my good shots (as far as the aeroplane were concerned) happened to be right in front of it. I just measured it off in Google Maps (which FINALLY has up-to-date imagery of the area instead of 10 year old stuff) — see below a measurement from where I was to that concrete wall you can see on the beach just to the right of the yellow road sign.

I've been to Tahunanui numerous times but many years ago when the airport simply wasn't as busy as it is now.

I find airliners can be deceptive in size. The A380 often doesn't seem as big as it should but at the right distance and angle they look huge. My son works at Wellington Airport and was standing on the apron one day right next to an arriving Singapore Airlines 777-200LR and he said it looked quite normal size even though the engines are about the same diameter as the A320s that are normal fare.

A couple for ZK - this Catalina taking off and landing all day at Taupo, but never getting very close to me so these are heavily cropped.

Ooooh! Jealous! Not much chance of seeing a water landing around here. They did promise to do one in Evans Bay soon after it arrived in the country but they decided against any salt water landings and to my knowledge they never have.

Attached Images

 

[richandfleur]

Just FYI, free trademe success fees for new listing tomorrow.
Free selling on 19 October!

---------- Post added 10-18-19 at 11:34 AM ----------

@richandfleur

Just thought I'd share the following video with you that shows how unreliable video AF can be

Pentax is clearly superior, as it has none of these focus jumping issues during video

I wouldn't get to hung up on it. As an operator we all make decisions about what auto settings we want to enable at any one time.
If we find the auto decisions are not what we want, then we can either adjust settings to influence them or disable the auto aspect altogether and operate in full manual mode.

Pentax offers continuous AF in video mode on the K-70, and the users can make the call on using this feature.
I've run some quick tests on live view face recognition in stills mode, and found that whilst it did identify a face, I actually couldn't hear it doing anything to adjust the focus on that point?
Overall it would track a face as it moved out of the focus zone, which I found quite weird and pointless.

Very expensive video cameras do face recognition, and then indicate how far in front or beyond the face you are focusing.
This allows for focus aides, whilst still keeping the camera in manual focus.
On other camera you can enable AF in video, but control how fast the camera adjusts to the new focus point, which enables smooth slow focus transitions that look very natural.
Lots of options, just not many on a Pentax unfortunately.

I actually shot an outdoor interview for my daughters school project recently. The Pentax did really well. External mic and audio gain adjustment options, focus peaking and digital zoom to confirm manual focus before recording etc.
Only disappointment was the overall very soft image in the final output. Use of DSLR lenses and control over depth of field etc was great, but your average cell phone produces a better image (just with fixed focal length and aperture).

[MarkJerling]

A couple for ZK - this Catalina taking off and landing all day at Taupo, but never getting very close to me so these are heavily cropped.

Cool shots!

A friend of mine has built this Catalina 3-d model:

You Tube

You Tube

[Arpe]

Cool shots!

A friend of mine has built this Catalina 3-d model:

Blender and Unreal 4 - Catalina PBY showcase - World of Clouds - YouTube

Holy moly - that would have taken a while!

[MarkJerling]

Holy moly - that would have taken a while!

I need to ask how many hours. It's for a computer game he's working on.

[Kiwizinho]

Cool shots!

A friend of mine has built this Catalina 3-d model:

Blender and Unreal 4 - Catalina PBY showcase - World of Clouds - YouTube

Wow! That's impressive! I've played with Blender briefly before, but never actually built anything with it, as it's a pretty complex bit of software. It is free though.

[zkarj]

Just FYI, free trademe success fees for new listing tomorrow.

You're welcome. It's pretty obvious to me they waited until I'd finally sold my K-5. And my iPhone 8. And my Apple Watch S2.

A friend of mine has built this Catalina 3-d model

Stunning! The level of detail is amazing.

[microlight]

Detailed indeed. Is it being built as an add-on for a simulator such as Prepar3D? Or a stand-alone game?

[MarkJerling]

Wow! That's impressive! I've played with Blender briefly before, but never actually built anything with it, as it's a pretty complex bit of software. It is free though.

I suspect that's why he uses it - good and free!

[MarkJerling]

You're welcome. It's pretty obvious to me they waited until I'd finally sold my K-5. And my iPhone 8. And my Apple Watch S2.


Stunning! The level of detail is amazing.

Very detailed. Look here for some close-ups: MICatalinaPBY

[MarkJerling]

Detailed indeed. Is it being built as an add-on for a simulator such as Prepar3D? Or a stand-alone game?

I'm not 100% sure how it all works but here's the information about it: Escape from Mill Station

[zkarj]

So a series of events conspired to cause me to check out DxO PhotoLab 3. I've had an initial play with the basics of library management — it supports hierarchical keywords! — and have scratched the surface of the processing. It doesn't seem to support PixelShift images but they aren't great in number in my collection (being new to the KP for me). But what I have noticed is its default treatment (not sure how to control that yet) yields some impressive results. Most notable to me is the amount of sharpness it can drag out of an image, though the noise reduction is a close runner up.

There's a 30-day trial so I'm going to have a good play with it, hopefully get out and shoot some new material so I can find a workflow that fits me.

[Class A]

So a series of events conspired to cause me to check out DxO PhotoLab 3.

I'd be interested to hear more about your future experiences.

I'm a happy Capture One Pro camper but it is always interesting to hear what is happening elsewhere.

[Kiwizinho]

So a series of events conspired to cause me to check out DxO PhotoLab 3. I've had an initial play with the basics of library management — it supports hierarchical keywords! — and have scratched the surface of the processing. It doesn't seem to support PixelShift images but they aren't great in number in my collection (being new to the KP for me). But what I have noticed is its default treatment (not sure how to control that yet) yields some impressive results. Most notable to me is the amount of sharpness it can drag out of an image, though the noise reduction is a close runner up.

There's a 30-day trial so I'm going to have a good play with it, hopefully get out and shoot some new material so I can find a workflow that fits me.

Looks really interesting, and not too badly priced. Unfortunately there's a disclaimer that some of the photo library features aren't available for Windows yet, but they're coming. I'll be interested to know how you get on.

One of the things I spotted on their site, is it supports local adjustments along the lines of Nik control points, which would be hugely useful. Lightroom supports some form of local adjustments, but there are a reduced set of parameters you can adjust when you do a local adjustment. Eg, for full image adjustment LR has several sliders that contribute to adjusting sharpness, but once you choose a local adjustment, you only get sharpness, without the extra parameters to fine tune it.
For natural history, this is a nuisance, as often I'll be using a high ISO, so I'll want to reduce noise for the background, but apply fine adjustment to detail.

[Class A]

One of the things I spotted on their site, is it supports local adjustments along the lines of Nik control points, which would be hugely useful.

Same holds true for Capture One Pro, BTW.

All adjustments (with the exception of very few that only make sense globally, such as "film grain") are supported as local adjustments without restriction.
The number of "layers" (essentially a "layer" is a mask + unlimited associated adjustments) is limited to 16 but I practically never hit that limit despite significantly tweaking of most of my images.