I bought a K-x in October, and I had about 3 months to practice with it before heading on a big trip to Turkey and Greece in January. I had taken about 3000 pics during the practice period. I realize that more experienced photographers may chuckle at the obviousness of some of the observations, but this was my first DSLR, and here are some good things I learned.
- Reading the manual in advance is a good thing. ;)
- Learn how to changes lenses quickly and carefully. I tried to have a routine to do so and minimize dust/dirt issues.
- I ended up using the Case Logic SLR205 sling bag. That was a good choice. I could have the bag in front of me and change lens by resting one lens in/on the bag.
- Learn how to keep your equipment clean and have the right tools... lens pen is very helpful and rocket blower will be necessary at some point.
- Gain some sense of what each lens can do and what are optimal settings.
- I found that I really liked the 55-300mm lens, but it helps to have a tripod or monopod to steady the long shots.
- I found that I had to work more to get good shots with the 18-55 lens. I ended up buying the Pentax 16-45, and that proved to be a good decision.
- I had practiced not using the Auto mode. I had not gotten comfortable and confident to use full manual mode, so I had ended up using Program mode most of the time. This proved NOT to be the best idea. I wish now that I had worked more in Aperture mode.
- I had extended my ISO range, so I could get down to 100.
- I had set the ISO adjustment to match the EV steps.
- I set my ISO range to be 100-2500. This worked pretty well.
- It seems to me now that Aperture is really the deal I want to control the most... depending on light and depth of field I want and the capabilities of the lens.
- In my sling bag, I carried my K-x, usually with the 16-45 attached. I also brought along the 55-300 and M 50 1.7. I had cleaning supplies, memory cards, and extra batteries. I also had a very compact, lightweight monopod.
- I kept the charger and plug adapter in the suitcase. Using Rayovac hybrids (the charge-holding eneloop type), I was easily getting 500 pics per set of batteries.
- I had saved the PDF of the K-x manual on my cell-phone, so I did have it if I needed it.
- I was able to borrow a netbook, and so each night I would back up all my pics to it and then type up notes of the pics I had taken. This worked well.
- I did not bring an external flash, and I didn't miss it.
WHAT DID I DISCOVER HAPPENED IN ACTUAL PRACTICE?
I was with a tour group visiting the usual tourist sites, and the biggest thing is that I simply did not have time to set up photos, take a bunch of shots, see what settings worked best, etc... Further, the K-x screen is simply not good enough, especially outdoors in the sun, to determine if I was getting the pics I wanted. Add that to groups of people moving in/out of shots, and I really had to be able to take pics quickly as they became available.
- I really needed to be thinking in advance. As noted above, I would have done better using the Aperture setting with the auto ISO range set and let the camera do the rest. (I kind of messed up a chunk of one day by setting the ISO high for a shot and then forgetting to return it to auto ISO...)
- I did use the 55-300 lens occasionally, but I simply did not have time to use the monopod. For the kind of typical sightseeing we did, I could have gotten by with something shorter, but I definitely would want something longer than the 16-45 range. I see now why some people like lens that go out to 70 or 135 at the long end.
- OTOH, I took an awful lot of pics at full wide angle (ie, at 16mm), and I would have liked an even wider angle many times. I took a number of pano shots (2-4 images), and I have found that PhotoshopElements 9 does an amazing job of stitching them together, even my handheld pics.
- BUT, that 16mm wide does create enough barrel distortion on verticals (all those ancient columns!), and I have not found an easy way to fix that in PSElements. (The "Correct Camera Distortion" filter is pretty worthless except for changing vertical perspective, not barrel distortion. I've ended up mainly doing a little Transform > Skew to make the distortion less distracting.)
- I never used the 50mm F1.7. We were outside most of the time. Many museums allowed non-flash photography, but I was shooting most of those shots in the 20-30mm range, so the 50 would have been too much.
- I'm glad I had a lens hood. I never dropped a lens, but when we are moving along in the group, I just didn't have the chance to climb around in the ruins to get the right sun angles. I did the best I could, but the hood was a help.
- As noted above, the CaseLogic 205 turned out to be a good bag (but I have some suggestions if they want to upgrade it...) I did bring along a little fanny pack that was just large enough to hold the K-x w/ the 16-45 and nothing else. This was a great thing. I didn't want to be toting around a nice camera bag full of goodies in the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul...
- Using Exposure Plot, I come up w/ the following info for a typical day's worth of shooting about 130 pics. About 1/5 of the shots were at 16mm (24mm on a 35mm equiv), about 1/4 - 1/3 were at at 45mm. A few shots with the 55-300 lens, and all the rest somewhere between 20-40mm. We had pretty sunny weather, so most of the shots were at ISO200, but that's also because I tended to leave the aperture too open too many times. (Ie, I had a lot of shots at F4 when I should have had it at 5.6 or more...)
- My sister was also on the tour, and she was using a Panasonic Lumix F28, not a bad little point-and-shoot. Comparing some of our similar pics, there are quite a few instances when she basically got as good a pic as I did. BUT, if there were any lighting challenges or when you would want to zoom in on some detail in the pic, there really was no comparison (as long as I was taking the pic correctly). The Pentax K-x was a great touring camera.
- Ideally, I would like having a lens that could do something like 12-120mm w/ little distortion, great sharpness, and capable of F2.8. Right... ;) (If such a lens existed, could I afford it?)
AFTER GETTING HOME...
I've been using Picasa3 to organize my pics and make minor corrections on a lot of them. Quick and easy... For any pic where I really want it to look a little better, I'm using Adobe PSElements9. That has worked very well. Fix up the lighting a bit, add a touch of sharpening if necessary, and good to go... As noted above, I've used the skewing to straighten out some wide angle shots, and the panoramic stitching feature is really great. Even after fixing in PSE9, however, I go back to Picasa3, because I then geotag the pics with the connected Google Earth. It's quite easy, and I can indicate where I took the shot to within meters. Then I've been uploading some of the ones I like better to the space provided on Picasa web albums.
The one challenge I'm having is fixing some barrel distortion. I'm starting to use the PanoTools plugins in PSE, and I seem to be getting some better results, but if anyone has better suggestions...
So, here's some examples of pics I liked from a couple days:
Aphrodisias and Laodicea in Turkey
Thessaloniki and Meteora in Greece.
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