The K-500 is similar to the K-50 so some of these settings should apply. You need to enable use of the aperture ring for one thing.
Using Older Lenses on the PENTAX K-50 | Ricoh Imaging Support Originally posted by tobyshootspentax Hi all,
I have three problems metering with a manual lens (a Centon 50mm f/1.7 - nice lens, but has its issues) and they are as follows:
1) The aperture is always wide open in Aperture Priority mode no matter what the setting on the lens is. (The lens does not have an "A" position on its aperture ring, does this make a difference?) However, the aperture stops down just fine in Manual mode when I press RAW/Fx which I've assigned to Optical Preview, and during the exposure.
See previous posters comments.
On flagship models activating the optical preview in manual mode would stop down the iris and turn on the exposure meter bars and yo could set the exposure with the eDials and aperture ring. Non-flagship models usually do not enable the bar meter.
Quote: 2) When the green button is pressed in Manual mode to get a meter reading, sometimes the camera can freeze up and not respond to anything (including the power switch) which ends in a battery pull - a pain when your tripod mounting plate obstructs the battery door!
As noted above this is not normal behavior. Does setting the camera options as above solve the problem? Perhaps a firmware update may also solve the problem. Normally the green button will stop down the lens, take a meter reading and set the shutter speed - provided you have the program set to Tv on the green button in manual mode.
Quote: 3) Flash exposure is WAY off. All of my images come out overexposed and the built-in flash seems to be firing at full power no matter what I set the flash exposure compensation to, which is annoying for portraiture and saps a fair bit of battery power when that happens.
Is there something I'm doing wrong? These issues are pretty annoying. Any help would be very much appreciated.
Thanks,
Toby
In manual mode the flash is always going to fire at full power. You need to set the ISO to the GN rating, the shutter speed to flash sync speed or slower (<= 1/180th sec) and divide the guide number of the flash by the flash to subject distance and set the f-stop to around that figure.