Hi Everyone,

I'm Don, a hobbyist/enthusiast, and live in Lenoir, NC.

Just bought a K30 today and hope to be getting acquainted with it ASAP.

My first SLR was a Pentax ME purchased in 1978. Hope to be able to use some of that kit with my K30.

Looking forward to participating in and learning from the group. BTW, where are the other K30 owners???

Cheers,
Don

Hello Don
Enjoy the K-30. it is a great camera . Make sure you enable the Aperture ring in the menu on the K-30. That will allow older glass to be used .
The K-30 is my second DSLR. my first was a Pentax istDL. I love that camera and the shots I get with it. After tweeking the colors a bit I am happy with the colors the K-30 is giving me Different sensors in the two. The DL has a CCD sensor and the K-30 has a CMOS I bought the K-30 for the SR, and low light capabilities where it leaves the DL in the dust.

Thanks Patrick, I'll definitely enable the aperture ring. Curious, what did you have to do to tweak the colors on your K-30?

A good place to start is here:

https://www.pentaxforums.com/forums/151-pentax-k-30-k-50/192015-post-your-k-30-photos-here.html

I use Lightroom 6 to adjust color in my images. I generally find that what I get is a little warmer than I would prefer, so I usually up the blues and remove some orange. Your color choices may vary of course, and you might find that you love what you get straight out of the camera!

That is odd I had to warm mine up. It struggled with green and gave cooler shots than what I like. Tonight when I get I will get may camera and see if I can figure the route out again. It was simple once I figured it out. Only 2 or 3 steps involved. And of coarse a few shots to test.

Page 155 of the owners manual. I shoot in the natural custom setting mostly so that is the one I changed. I left the others pretty much at factory settings other than lanscape
Inf button while in standby.
custom image press OK
pick the custom setting you want to change/adjust press info Instructions will be on the rear screen just follow till you are happy with the results

Thanks Patrick.

Your lenses, individual camera's sensor, monitor, aesthetic, etc may and probably does vary from mine. I also pretty much work with RAW (DNG) files exclusively so the in-camera profiles really don't matter to me, but I do like the greens I get on my jpegs of the northern lights.

YEAH I figure a lot of the setting changes are there for personal taste since we all do not have the same
I wish I had had Digital when I lived in Fairbanks back in the 70's I have some nice shots on film of the Northern lights but a lot of the neg's have gotten hard and some even lost over several moves.
I shoot some raw but for me the JPEGS are good enough. My computer is also getting full ans well as my backup drive. JPEGS take up less space I suppose it is time to start thinking about a new computer and possibly cloud storage

@djb47

Another thing I did was I warmed up the WB That can be done in the white balance screen on the camera.Press WB on 4 way controller and follow directions

I haven't had a chance to do a lot of shooting with the K30 and the 18-55 kit but it seems to have plenty of WB warmth already. May have to cool it down a bit.

I've never shot with the kit 18-55, I bought mine with the 18-135 for a one lens solution.

I've since replaced it with a pair of fantastic lenses, the HD DA 20-40mm and DA* 50-135 f2.8. A big investment, and a fantastic one in terms of IQ.