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Forum: Troubleshooting and Beginner Help
11-29-2012, 09:49 PM
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I shoot landscapes professionally and must say that good equipment is only a benefit if one is able to take advantage of its benefits. Talent is of paramount importance. A great photo is great whether it was taken with a Kx, 645D or a 5x7. One of the best shots I have ever seen was from 35mm film (Kitt Peak Observatory with lightning- Arizona Highways). The equipment is secondary to the photographer's ability.
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Forum: Pentax K-5 & K-5 II
05-18-2011, 05:21 PM
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Modes and highlights... there may be some other small settings I am forgettin in these recipes, but you get the picture.
Sports - adjusted per this months recommendations in Outdoor Photographer for speedy AF - no SR, release priority, Tv, etc. Also, I prefer using the AF button when shooting sports, so have that enabled and half press disabled. Playing with this to optimize. Release priority is working better than I thought. I am not getting quite as many OOF as I thought I would (kid's baseball is the testbed here)
Handheld Bracket - Av, Bracket of three, no timer/SR engaged, 1 push bracket release
Tripod Bracket - Av, Bracket of five, timer/no SR engaged, 1 push bracket release
Theater - AF assist off, LCD off, status off, beep off, various other stealthy tweaks for those situations where people do not like hearing or seeing so much of you.
Utility Program - Standard program mode with tweaks; more or less a placeholder for playing with settings to come up with the next great user mode.
That sounds good. Will try that for sure.
woof
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Forum: Pentax K-5 & K-5 II
05-18-2011, 12:35 PM
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I made 5 users:
- portrait : P-mode set to shallow DoF (front wheel Tv, rear wheel Av), auto-iso to low, burst set to low, flash in wireless Controller mode.
- Manual Focus portrait : same as above, but with AF point disabled (so I don't have the blinking red square ruining my eye concentration), catch focus enabled, AF button set to disable AF.
- Action : P-mode set to Speed (front wheel Tv, rear wheel Av), auto-iso to normal, burst set to high, AF-C set to Focus, flash in normal mode.
- Fast Action : P-mode set to Speed (front wheel Tv, rear wheel Av), auto-iso to high, burst set to high, AF-C set to FPS, flash in normal mode.
- Small JPEG (for my brenizer shots) : M mode, Daylight WB, Reversal film
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Forum: Pentax SLR Lens Discussion
04-12-2011, 07:30 AM
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For a given lens focal length, f-stop, etc the only thing that affects image magnification is how far it is from the sensor. That means there need be no inherent optical difference between a lens marked 1:2 and one marked 1:1.
At least for older (non-internal focus) lenses, the only difference between a 1:1 and a 1:2 macro lens is how far the focusing mechanism moves the lens from the sensor. You can take a 1:2 lens & put it on an extension tube equal to half its focal length; you now have a 1:1 lens!
If your camera's sensor were perfect you could take a photo at 1:2 and enlarge it by a factor of 2x and have the same detail; unfortunately your sensor is far from perfect and the enlargement will not have some detail that would have been in the 1:1 unenlarged image from the same lens.
So the answer to your question is yes, a 1:1 lens may show more detail than a 1:2 lens but it doesn't necessarily mean the lens is any better.
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Forum: Flashes, Lighting, and Studio
12-29-2010, 04:20 PM
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The reason 1/60 was "traditional" has to do with mechanical considerations....that was the fastest speed horizontal-run shutter curtains on SLRs could sync. If they could have done it faster, they would have. Some of the older ones could only muster 1/50, while other designs of camera (rangefinder, TLR, etc) using leaf shutters could usually sync at any shutter speed up to their maximum, which was typically 1/500. Later designs in SLRs went to vertical-run shutters and could sync faster, around 1/100 or so. Further improvements ensued until in the digital age we have 1/180 being the shortest amount of time the shutter can have the sensor entirely exposed at the same instant (for Pentax, anyway).
Shutter speed doesn't play quite as large a role in killing subject movement/blur in flash photography as it does in non-flash photography. The reason being that the stunningly short duration of the burst of light from your flash effectively becomes your shutter speed and is fast enough to freeze practically anything. The larger the difference between the light from the flash and the light from other sources, the less difference your shutter speed makes.
Where shutter speed starts to make a creative difference is when you choose to have in your photo a blend of light from the flash and light from other sources....typically referred to as "ambient light", which is a fancy shorthand way of saying "light from sources and at levels you have no control over".
Sometimes your flash will be powerful enough to overpower ambient light, meaning that all the light showing up in your photo will effectively have come from your flash. A good way to see this is to do a flash shot and then to repeat the shot at the same settings (shutter, aperture, ISO) without the flash and see what it looks like. Here's an example of what I'm talking about:
In that shot, even though the lights were on in the room all the light that went toward that exposure came from the flash (ceiling-bounced). Shots at the same settings in the same location where the flash didn't fire (due to my not waiting for it to charge) revealed shots near pitch-black.
Sometimes you want to shoot like that, making use of only the light from the flash and excluding ambient light as much as possible. In that case, you want to get the shutter speed up as high as you can to cut down the influence of ambient light and crank up your flash enough to overpower it, as with this daytime outdoor shot:
Other times you may wish to balance flash and ambient light. This will require that you know what exposure you'll be getting with flash, what the exposure would be without it, and then juggle them so the gap is as wide or narrow as you choose...."balance" not necessarily meaning "make them equal" in this case.
For this sort of use it is important to bear in mind that in flash photography when talking about exposure we always speak in terms of what f-stop we're getting without even mentioning the shutter speed. For a given flash output at a given ISO at a given distance, you get a particular f-stop value of light. So long as you use that aperture and ISO, the shutter speed is completely irrelevant to the exposure (other than mechanical limitations imposed by the camera). This confused the hell out of me at first, because I would see mention of a flash giving, for example, f8 of light on a particular subject and want to scream out, "f8 at what shutter speed?!?!". Knowing that it does not matter at all for the flash portion of the light in a shot is what allows us to then use the shutter speed to creatively monkey around with how much all the other light affects the shot. It also explains why people want higher and higher sync speeds....it isn't so much about stopping motion as it is about broadening the range in which you can play around balancing flash and ambient, allowing you more wiggle room for minimizing the effect of ambient light, useful outdoors on sunnier days (or alternately, outdoors with weaker flash units).
The process isn't very hard. Basically you just need to know what f-stop your flash is giving you, then with your camera meter the scene at that same f-stop and see what the shutter speed is. The greater the difference between the metered shutter speed and your max sync speed, the more room you have for creative adjustment. For example, in the following shot I used a grid snoot to spotlight the stuffed animals, then metered the scene and cranked up the shutter speed by two stops to make the parts of the scene not hit by the spotlight come out as two stops underexposed by ambient light:
The metered shutter speed was about 1/2 second, which I adjusted to 1/8 to underexpose the background by two stops. It would have been possible to use faster shutter speeds (up to sync speed) but the only visible effect would have been on the balance between the spotlighted toys and the background, with the background getting progressively darker and darker. At some point...around 4~5 stops difference, the background would effectively disappear completely and render as black. As you can see, from 1/8 - 1/15 - 1/30 - 1/60 - 1/120 etc I still had roughly another 4 1/2 stops more latitude for playing around with the ambient light relative to the flash.
This post has gotten so long I've started to lose track of what point I was trying to make when I started it, which is always a good sign it is time to end it.
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