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Forum: Pentax K-30 & K-50
04-08-2024, 01:32 PM
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Kind of a bust here just south of Rochester, NY. Heavy clouds without even a sliver of the sun poking through. All the kids and some of the parents were all out having a good time. Scooters on the street and footballs sailing through the air. Dogs running all over the place off their leashes having a good time too. When totality struck it got real dark and all the little kids were running around, jumping up and down, screaming and having a great time so I guess it may have been successful after all.
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Forum: General Talk
03-27-2024, 05:43 AM
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For my birthday (73 for those interested) my wife got me a copy of Ghost Town Living by Brent Underwood, It is about the ghost town of Cerro Gordo California. Brent used his life savings to purchas the town in 2020 and is trying to pump some life back into it. It was the home of the largest silver mine in the country and the profits form it built Los Angeles into a major city. I follow his Youtube channel called "Ghost Town Living".
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Forum: General Talk
03-27-2024, 05:48 AM
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I once ordered a part for a customer and our company was a big user of UPS. Well instead of going from Chicago to Memphis to Saratoga Springs, NY it got to Memphis and then made 4 round trips between Memphis, Tennessee and Paris France before the package was finally routed to the customer.
They all have their problems.
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Forum: General Photography
03-16-2024, 07:13 AM
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Quad Graphics had a large printing plant in Saratoga Springs that employs about 400 people. It prints magazines such as Sports illustrated, Look, Time Newsweek, People, Wired, Us etc. Dozens of them. Also the Cabelas Catalog and many other publications. If you read any of those magazines the proofs and pringing plates to make them were imaged on equipment that I serviced. They were even a branch of the US Postal Service and mailed the magazines directly to their subscribers from there, They are shutting the plant down over the next few months. I spent 17 years providing field service for Creo, and Kodak equipment installed there.
FWIW I still prefer the printed page.
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Forum: Pentax K-1 & K-1 II
03-07-2024, 11:09 AM
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As pert of eclipse prep, I tried out my new 86mm solar filter on my D FA 150-450 with my K1-II. The more I practice, the more I am sure that the day will be cloudy. :o
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Forum: Film SLRs and Compact Film Cameras
10-17-2021, 10:30 AM
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My first SLR was a Mamiya/Sekor 500 DTL. I loved the little spot metering area in the center bottom of viewfinder. You could meter multiple areas of the scene and and do a quick mental exercise to get the exposure you needed for the results you wanted. I never figured out why the Pentax "SPOT"matic did not have spot metering capabilities. My second SLR was a Spotmatic II and in a few ways I found it inferior the my 500DTL.
DTL stands for "Dual Through the Lens" metering. It had both spot and averaging metering capability.
It is a very capable camera.
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Forum: General Talk
03-04-2024, 04:22 PM
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An 86mm solar filter from Seymour solar. For my Pentax D FA 150-450 lens. This should ensure that April 8 will be plenty cloudy around here.
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Forum: Pentax News and Rumors
02-28-2024, 10:43 AM
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Too old to build one now. If I was going to get into medium or large format B&W I would probably get one but there is no longer the large selection of B$W films, developers and papers available so it may get a bit frustrating. B&W photography is much harder to master than color but it is much more satisfying when it works out.
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Forum: General Talk
02-23-2024, 06:33 AM
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I had some sort of PDA back in the day. It was a small flip up model with a keyboard. IT was awesome.............until it died and all my data disappeared. After that I went back to, and never abandoned my paper daily planner until I retired some 15 years later. Used it to maintained contacts, mileage and expenses. Never failed me.
YES!!!!! The old Weston Master V meter counts.
My 200 year old hand forged cross peen hammer that came out of an old carriage makers shop in Avon, NY still works great too.
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Forum: General Photography
02-15-2024, 09:15 AM
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To see if one may benefit you, take a regular rifle with a scope on it. Simply look down it and see how steady you are while standing (the offhand position). If you can hold it reasonably steady then it should work for you. To steady yourself, take the elbow of the arm you are using for your trigger finger and tuck it into you chest. You do not want that elbow sticking out there like a chicken wing. Plus it helps to lean into it a bit and have a good stance.
If you are a good offhand shot with a rifle one of these may be the way to go for you. If you want to get really good at photographing birds in flight go out an start shooting sporting clays. Two benefits. You increase tracking skills and there is just something innately satisfying about smacking the heck out of those clays. Very relaxing.
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Forum: Pentax K-1 & K-1 II
02-06-2024, 08:44 PM
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For some reason I like the graffiti. Adds a bit of color.
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Forum: Pentax K-1 & K-1 II
02-06-2024, 02:09 PM
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I decided to take a few photos today. With no snow the landscape is pretty blah, but I decided to give it a go anyway.
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Forum: Film Processing, Scanning, and Darkroom
02-08-2024, 01:11 PM
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When the roll coating machines could run 24 hours a day, 7 day a week they were extremely efficient. Nowadays this is no longer happening. I know that in the mid 1980's, every time a film roll coating line was shut down at Kodak, it cost $7,000,000 to restart. Not sure what they are doing today but film emulsion manufacturing and coating is an extremely complex operation. Then after that the film has to sit and continue to ripen for several weeks and the chemical reactions completed. This is usually over a 6 week to 2 month period.
Modern reversal films have some 23 different layers in them. All within the thickness of a sheet of cellophane wrapper. B&W film is much less complex. but still needs to ripen before it meet specs.
I have actually made a B&W film emulsion from scratch. Wound up with an ISO of about 100. It was a process that took several days in the chemistry lab at college stretched out over two weeks. Lots of letting the emulsion sit and do it's thing over several days. Ours was so good that my lab partner and I won top prize. A case of beer!!!
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Forum: Pentax K-1 & K-1 II
02-06-2024, 07:40 PM
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It was added in post processing. I use SilkyPix 10 Developer Pro.
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Forum: Vintage Cameras and Equipment
01-29-2024, 08:56 AM
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A few from glass plates I dug out of a trash bin at Eastman Kodak in the late 1980's. There is a photo with a calendar showing March 1918 so they are about 100 years old. I used to get old Daguerreotypes from antique stores for about $0.50 a piece back in the olden days of my youth. I just gave them to my uncle who was interested in them.
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Forum: Pentax DSLR Discussion
10-25-2023, 03:40 PM
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I rarely use teleconverters, but back in early June 2016 I had just retired and rewarded myself with a trip to Yellowstone. I was sitting in a roadside pullout just taking it all in and I saw a tiny dark spot on a patch of snow over a mile off. I pulled out my my binoculars and saw that it was a bear. So for grins and giggles I mounted my D FA 150-450 onto a tripod. Then I attached an old Tamron 1.4x teleconverter and added an even older Vivitar 2x Macro teleconverter.
Once it was ll set up I could see that it was a grizzly sow and three cubs. I took a few photos simply because it may have been a once in a lifetime sighting for me. To my surprise the photos came out better than I anticipated. Not National Geographic quality by any means, but better than expected.
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Forum: Pentax News and Rumors
01-25-2024, 08:09 AM
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What do you call it if you use an analogue system like film? Analscoping? Wait!. They make one of those already. :eek:
My Pentax 10x43 Z-Series ZD ED Binoculars are tier one optics. Their field of view is not as wide and the really high expense binoculars, but the image is every bit as good. At Yellowstone I could not separate my wife from them. We did a lot of scanning the far off areas looking for wolves and bears. Found some too. This should be a great spotting scope. Scanning the mountain tops along the road that goes to the NE entrance is a great place for this type of activity.
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Forum: General Talk
01-21-2024, 11:11 AM
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Miranda's were never one of the "big" cameras. They were very popular among wedding photographers as backups and for candid photographs. They were very quiet compared to the normal SLR.
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Forum: General Talk
01-21-2024, 11:30 AM
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My dad was either patient #1 or #2 for lens replacement surgery in 1980 or so. His first eye surgery took 6 1/2 hours. The second one a few month later only 2 1/2 hours. For some years later he had a note on his medical records that if he died the lenses in his eyes would have to be removed for evaluation.
About 20 years later I took my father in law in for lens replacement and didn't even get through two articles in the Smithsonian magazine in the lobby before we were on the way home.
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Forum: Pentax KP
01-11-2024, 05:35 AM
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Very nice shots and I think that you just came up with the new Pentax slogan.
It's okay! It's a Pentax!:lol:
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Forum: Pentax K-3 & K-3 II
01-06-2024, 07:03 AM
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Anybody in the PNW find a 737 Max plug door in their back yard? Must have been one heck of a flight. Glad everyone is okay.
Paging RacerX!!!! NTSB on line 1.
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Forum: Pentax K-1 & K-1 II
12-14-2023, 02:26 PM
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No. By the time you are three feet away from them the extra radiation pretty much gone. Where I live the normal background radiation seems to be about 35 to 50 counts per minute. If you put the lens on the camera and then test you can barely detect it either in fron of the camera or behind hte camera. So you are good to go. Do your lenses have a yellow tint?
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Forum: General Talk
12-30-2023, 09:45 AM
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A 50" 4K Vizeo Z series TV. Our old Vizeo 1080p started having problems after 14 years of faithful service. Cost all of $270 at BJ's Wholesale club. Good enough for us. Actually a bit bigger than I wanted. Until I took the old one, and some other old electronics to the recycling center today we had the luxury of two TV's in the house!.
The kids got us a Ring doorbell for the house for Christmas. I guess I need to install that as my next project.
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Forum: Film Processing, Scanning, and Darkroom
11-19-2023, 05:30 PM
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Not anymore. When they spun off Eastman Chemical in the mid 1994 they essentially took a loaded shotgun, stuck it in their mouth and pulled the trigger. It was all part of their hip new strategy to become an electronics based company. It seemed that every person at Kodak saw the insanity of this but the president of the company. I am convinced that the last president of Kodak was put there to kill the company. Nobody with a job performance record like his would have stayed employed there as long as he was.
He was equally shocked when the first thing that Eastman Chemical did once they were independent of Kodak was raise the cost of the chemicals used to manufacture film by 30%. Prior to the spinoff EKC had to sell these chemicals to the film manufacturing division at cost.
I still get mightily PO'd at how the senior management of Kodak destroyed it. It was not fun to live through.
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Forum: Pentax K-3 III
12-23-2023, 03:53 PM
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Once I got my K1 in May 2016 APS-c pretty much died to me. The K1 images just had something that my K5, K5-IIs and K3 did not. I not longer have either K5 and my K3 sits pretty much neglected. I occasionally swap in a fully charged battery and exercise it a bit to insure that it is working. I added a K1-II in 2018.
Is APSc still needed?
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