Whilst doing the dishes and pondering those shots it came to me, if I'd brought in an assignment like the one posted for the k-5 and k-30 and tried to excuse that kind of loss of detail when the camera is clearly capable of better, he would have laughed my sorry ass right out of class.
These guys do a fantastic service to photographers putting these images up the way they do. But they probably don't have the time to sit down and completely optimize every image they take. You have to know enough about photography to look at those images and know what you're seeing. If the camera can produce the quality shown in the bottom right of a K-5 and K-30 images, it can produce the same quality throughout the frame. The issue isn't with the camera, it's with the photographer.
Sorry if I was little harsh.. but this is basic photography. It's your job as photographer to get it right, not the cameras. And it's never the cameras fault. It's the photographers fault. If he's using the wrong equipment to start with that's his fault. If he's not getting everything he can out of an image, that's his fault. The camera can't do that for you everytime, sometime you have to know enogh to overide the deaults and get it done right. The first rule of photography.. maintain maximum possible detail in your original image. If you want to blow out your highlights or create dark shadows in PP that's fine, but in your original image, always shoot for the maximum detail.
The guys who handed in those K-5 and K-30 images, they get a failing grade in any course I ever took, or taught.
You always want to check and make sure you aren't getting sucked in by someone else's incompetence. Imagine if I went to an editor with one of those images and tried to say the camera made me do it that way...
honest, there are a lots of areas in technical photography where an image like that would get you fired, and it has nothing to do with the limitations of the K-5 or K-30.
Last edited by normhead; 10-19-2012 at 10:07 AM.