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Forum: Pentax DSLR Discussion
01-29-2024, 08:50 PM
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I use the focus confirmation also for manual lenses. I have found I get best results by commencing the focus action on the near focus side of the image as stopping as soon as I get the focus confirmation.
On my K-1 I have also used the Apply All focus adjustment option to optimise the focus for my manual lenses. This setting doesn't impact my autofocus lenses which all have Apply One fine tuning set but does give me very accurate focus confirmation for manual lenses.
I've had very good results with the M135/3.5 on my K-1 provided focus is spot-on. If not, colour fringing chromatic aberations intrude.
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Forum: Troubleshooting and Beginner Help
02-26-2023, 11:37 PM
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Getting into the back of the lens is pretty easy. From memory, there are a few bits that could be misassembled and hopefully easily made good.
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Forum: Troubleshooting and Beginner Help
08-24-2022, 02:52 AM
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I've recently used a Wasabi twin battery USB charger in my car and it charged two batteries just fine (similar need to you - multi week road trip with a few longer periods away from mains power).
The key requirement is to get a 12v USB adapter (the thing you stick into the cig socket) that outputs 2.4 amps on a least one of its USB socket and then use that socket. Some older/cheapie units only output 0.5 or 1 amp and that's not enough to charge camera batteries in any reasonable time. If the USB adapter says fast charging capable or tablet compatible it's likely got high enough current output to charge camera batteries.
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Forum: Troubleshooting and Beginner Help
05-09-2022, 04:39 AM
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Might simply be the dreary day. A mix of flat light and not being inspired by the conditions. Try again on a more pleasant day. In the interim, check the focus calibration of your lenses on the new camera. Doesn’t take much in mis-calibration to degrade the ‘pop’ of your images.
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Forum: Troubleshooting and Beginner Help
02-23-2022, 06:24 AM
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There is a lot of smoke and mirrors in the battery market at present. Only only needs to look at so called power stations that purport to do all sorts of wonderful things. Inside are some lithium batteries with a grab bag of buck boost converters to different voltages. Some of the milli amp hour claims are outrageous eg marketed as 12 volt systems but the milli amp hour capacity is based off a 5V usb outlet. As all these voltages are created by buck boost converters they have hard current limits well inside the batteries own ability to supply current so struggle with start up currents on motors in ways straight batteries never would..
Problem I see with using the cells the OP is describing is that when a cell closes down due to its battery becoming depleted, it will be a hard close down without warning to the camera. The camera will then just crash. With conventional batteries, they just progressively weaken, the camera will commence and perform a managed shutdown once it detects voltage is below a certain threshold. Imagine a sudden loss of power when one of these new style cells closes down and your camera just happens to be in the middle of a write to your SD card. Probably not a happy ending with a corrupted SD card on your hands.
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Forum: General Talk
09-15-2021, 05:17 AM
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Depends, does your lens experience ghosting?
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Forum: Post Your Photos!
09-01-2021, 06:27 AM
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First butterfly of the season (Australian painted lady) taken 21st August. Landed in front of me to soak up the late afternoon light.
An early spring this year, feels a good couple of weeks+ ahead of normal.
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Forum: Photographic Industry and Professionals
08-27-2021, 05:03 AM
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There is an assumption here that TMSC manufacture the chips used by Pentax. That we don’t know. They are likely sourced from a number of manufacturers. The expensive chips will be in the camera and not lenses. Recent chip supply costs possibly may explain the relatively high cost of the K-3iii vs the K-1. The K-1 main processor chips were likely all manufactured some years ago at a contracted price and slowly been drawn down from inventory as cameras are assembled.
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Forum: General Talk
08-13-2021, 05:16 AM
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So you obviously passed the sniff test with her!
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Forum: Troubleshooting and Beginner Help
08-20-2021, 02:49 AM
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I would disagree with the suggestion to avoid manual focus lenses. The focus confirm beep/light, if you have calibrated AF via the Adjust All setting, I have found to be quite accurate. As you can see from my signature, I have one or two manual lenses.
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Forum: Post Your Photos!
08-13-2021, 07:23 AM
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They’re a cute bird with a bit of attitude. Common resident down my way …have heaps of them in my backyard when my ironbark gum flowers in autumn.
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Forum: Lens Clubs
07-20-2021, 11:16 PM
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From my Single In March efforts with the M50/1.4, wide open from memory.
Little bit of colour fringing to clean up in post processing, but overall, I thought the lens behaved very well.
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Forum: Mini-Challenges, Games, and Photo Stories
07-20-2021, 10:55 PM
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Some more farmyard rust...
K-1 + DFA*50/1.4 |
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Forum: Mini-Challenges, Games, and Photo Stories
07-18-2021, 04:43 AM
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Was once a giant.
A Dodge V8 Power Giant that is, or rather, was.
K-1 + DFA*50/1.4 |
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Forum: Mini-Challenges, Games, and Photo Stories
07-15-2021, 02:34 AM
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I was down there about a week ago. The Ethel is somewhat exposed and the Ferret’s boiler as usual is visible.
---------- Post added 15th Jul 2021 at 08:19 PM ----------
Not quite what happened but there is irony in what transpired. The Ethel was a three masted barque that ran aground after damaging its rudder on a nearby reef. Yes, the Ferret came to Ethel’s aid but was not damaged in the process. The Ferret was wrecked much later in 1920, the irony being it was on the exact same beach as the Ethel. The Ferret was a schooner rigged steamer and how it got to Australia is a story in itself. Built for the Scottish coastal trade, it was stolen by confidence tricksters in 1880 and was eventually recognised in Melbourne, Australia by a newly arrived Scottish policeman!
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Forum: Pentax SLR Lens Discussion
07-12-2021, 06:31 AM
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I’ve performed focus confirmation calibration for some of my M series lenses which has improved my results with manual lenses. Firstly, as there is a range where the focus confirmation light will come on, I consistently focus my manual lenses from a setting short of what will be the correct distance out to the distance where the confirmation light comes on. This eliminates the variation that comes from alternating which direction I approach the focus point from. I then fine tune the focus confirmation using the Apply All sub menu, as Apply One only works with chipped lenses (F and later). Apply One (where set for an autofocus lens) I believe overrides the Apply All setting so this method doesn’t upset your autofocus lenses calibrations. I don’t think it matters what method you use for calibration - whatever you are comfortable with/find quickest.
Why do manual focus lenses need focus adjustment? Firstly the relationship between the distance from flange to focus sensor and flange to the imaging sensor needs to very precise (I would presume equal?). Bearing in mind the path to the focus sensor passes thru the main mirror and bounces off a secondary mirror behind that, it’s not hard to see where some camera to camera variation will come from. Presumably some calibration is done in factory, but where the mirror settles on its stops after some use might take a while to become consistent and that in itself influences the distance to the focus sensor. That would be in addition to any manufacturing tolerance variability of which there will always be some. Secondly, aberrations of wide open lenses seem to impact focus confirmation accuracy/reliability (not all colours will be focussed at the same point) so you are also attempting to account for this. And we know most older manual focus lenses have a fair few colour aberrations wide open.
I’ve only check a few of my short tele M lens this way and the same Apply All setting seems close enough for those settings. Once done I was much more successful focussing my M lenses with consistent results at wide apertures.
---------- Post added 13th Jul 2021 at 12:35 AM ----------
That’s the way I’ve undertaken focus fine tuning also, but it can be slow to do, needing sometimes to go back to the target and retest and re-review. The dot method allows all the tuning to be done just using the camera and target, and by its nature requires repetitive focussing activity which will tend to average away the little bit of variability between each focus attempt (greatly lowering the sampling noise). That slight inconsistency from focus attempt to focus attempt can sometimes make the ‘take it back to the computer’ approach a bit annoying slow if you only take one or two shots at each adjustment as you may not catch the shot to shot variability on the first attempt.
You won’t notice this variability between focus attempts while shooting the target with a newer lens without a focus scale but if you have an older lens with a distance scale and mark the live view focus point with a pen on masking tape applied to the moving focus ring, the variability between each focus attempt becomes quite apparent.
The dot approach by its nature leads to dozens of focus lock attempts (done quite quickly) and that higher number of samples will improve the signal to noise (statistically speaking) of the testing process and improve confidence in the result. I quite like it’s approach for that reason and will try it out on my DFA 28-105 as I’m currently torn between +3 and +4 for that lens. My testing suggested +4 but in the field I lean towards +3. The dot method is a different approach and I will be interested to see what that suggests is the optimal adjustment. It’s also a very quick way to assess the adjustment at different focal lengths.
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Forum: Photographic Industry and Professionals
06-06-2021, 04:20 AM
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The global chip shortage is turning up in almost all markets and I would suspect specialised low production run chips are particularly problematic.
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Forum: Lens Clubs
03-08-2021, 05:14 AM
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One from the M50/1.4 that I'm Singling in March.
Mucking about to see how little light I can get by with at F1.4 ...well into the blue hour.
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Forum: Pentax News and Rumors
04-01-2021, 06:51 PM
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The GPS processor chip is quite likely very small. The GPS antenna is dealing with reception of radio frequencies so size-wise it needs to be of certain dimensions to be tunable to GPS radio frequencies and be able to pull in sufficient signal to provide reliable signal input to the GPS processor. This limits how far the antenna can be shrunk. Phones have plenty of room to run antenna around the interior of the case. Given the metal construction of the K3iii, the potential locations of antenna is limited as they need to be outside the metal frame of the camera.
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Forum: General Talk
04-13-2021, 04:00 AM
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Somewhere in the bottom half of a McLaren Vale shiraz listening to The Verve “Bitter Sweet Harmony”.
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Forum: Photographic Technique
04-13-2021, 03:49 AM
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Ok, so we’re staring to see where the Astro part of your forum name derives from!
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Forum: Mini-Challenges, Games, and Photo Stories
04-01-2021, 08:15 PM
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Done with the M50/1.4 for now. Took photos most days but missed a few days posting in the middle when I was out of town quite a bit.
Was surprised in a positive way with this lens.
My prior use suffered from:
(1) poor close shooting technique while using wide apertures. Using the M120/2.8 and M85/2 in challenges over the past year has improved my technique/understanding so I think I was finally ready for a 1.4 lens.
(2) the infinity mark was completely off so previous distance shots were just 'not right' so the lens went back on the shelf. I made the effort early in the month to go down with a JIS screwdriver to the train line where I can get a good long view and reset the infinity calibration. Lens much improved at infinity but I still think not quite as good as a F1.7. I would recommend a 1.7 over a 1.4 for landscapes.
So, how was I surprised?
Much better centre sharpness at wide apertures than I expected. Technique counts!
Really nice bokeh at wider apertures.
Far fewer colour aberations than I was expecting. There were some but mostly easily dealt with in Lightroom. Would go so far as to say the lens is quite well behaved. In general the M series seems to be much happier on full frame than APS-C.
Contrast generally good although not to modern lens standards. A tweak in LR generally brough contrast up to desired levels.
Reliably focussed using the K-1 focus confirmation (which I had calibrated using Correct All setting last year for the M120/2.8 challenge). Autofocus lens calibrations over-rides this if done using Correct One so quite a set and forget solution to swap between manual and autofocus lenses.
And after my Tuesday delivery, soooo compact.
On the downside, my copy is a little decentred on far left of frame. Generally not an issue on close ups but noticable on infinity focus shots.
In summary for those looking to use older lenses, I would recommend the M50/1.4 for close up to middle distance shooting but a 1.7 for landscapes.
Oh, and the HD DFA 50 1.4?
Size-wise not that different to my usual walkaround the DFA28-105. But its a heavy beast for extended use. My post for the 30th makes stark the size difference with the M50/1.4.
Yes its sharp, sharp, sharp! When pixel peeping there are no little blurry circle of confusion spots that less sharp lenses create when they can't resolve the finest details (and then get amplified with sharpening). There is just detail! And sharp all over.
Took a while to settle on the lens calibration setting. In the end, -3 seemed the best compromise. What I found after (a little frustration with focussing) is that with centre spot focus, the true AF focus point seems to be at the very far right edge of the square box shown in the viewfinder (at least for my K-1). Enough to make a diference when trying to pick out a specifc edge as the point of focus eg one cactus leaf over the one immediately behind.
Its been gloriously sunny and warm autumn weather the last few days but too harsh for interesting daytime photography. Waiting now for some moodier light to see what character the HD DFA brings to images.
Will glue onto the K-1 for now as my walk about lens (sorry DFA28-105, shelf time for you).
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Forum: Mini-Challenges, Games, and Photo Stories
03-28-2021, 05:25 PM
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The Fat Fifty is already on its way, along with a supplementary order of a protective filter made late last night when I realised that the new lens sits between the 67 and 77mm filters I have on hand. Brian @dcxpert is very good to deal with.
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Forum: Mini-Challenges, Games, and Photo Stories
03-28-2021, 03:42 PM
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Deflecting from Weighty Eighty conversations, I managed to get into the group of 15 finalists for the February Cityscape by Night which was a first. The Melbourne image #11 was mine. Shot some years back with a Tamron 17-50 when I was still on APS-C. Casual walk along the Yarra while in Melbourne overnight for business.
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Forum: Mini-Challenges, Games, and Photo Stories
03-27-2021, 09:38 PM
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Hmmm, using the M50/1.4 this month has turned out to be very expensive :eek::eek:
Quite liked this month (and recent other SIC with the M85 & 120) the shallow depth of field business which is something traditionally I haven’t done much of. The M50 is nice and I like its bokeh but not quite up overall there at infinity distance with modern lenses or my F50/1.7 (and pixel peeping determining it is slightly de-centred on far left of frame. So I was looking closely, very closely at an A50/1.2. Around AUD800 on EBay for a clean copy. But still had residual concerns about sharpness stopped down for infinity landscape images.
Instead I just hit BUY on a DFA50/1.4. I was really resisting adding more weight to my camera bag, but what the heck. So on Wednesday I’ll find out what all the fuss about the new gen primes is all about.
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