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Forum: Troubleshooting and Beginner Help
04-11-2024, 02:16 PM
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Or set the mode dial to TAv, which means you set shutter speed and aperture manually and ISO goes wherever it needs to.
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Forum: General Photography
04-08-2024, 05:44 AM
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I'm surprised the phone did that poorly. This is a situation where most modern cell phones would probably produce a better result than an ILC in Auto or green mode, because the phones (at least good ones like iPhones or Pixels or I would have thought a recent vintage Samsung) bracket and combine exposures in the background all the time, automatically.
I just walked outside and took a test photo through some trees of the sun, heavily backlit somewhat similarly to your shots. And the phone (2-year-old Google Pixel 6) clearly combined multiple exposures to get fairly good color and details of the trees and leaves and buildings despite sun being in the frame. Can't post it because I'm at work, but I could replicate this at home later on.
Yes, you can obviously use an ILC to either bracket and combine multiple exposures in camera or in post, or you can use the much greater leeway of a RAW file to get similar or better results. But I don't think your first photo is necessarily representative of a good recent cell phone.
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Forum: Pentax K-3 III
04-07-2024, 08:28 AM
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Exactly, it's AF-C when you need it and AF-S when you need that.
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Forum: Pentax News and Rumors
04-06-2024, 05:41 AM
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I think that in a world where Ricoh releases completely new products at a glacial pace, they believe the 60-250 replacement is the 70-210 f/4.
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Forum: Pentax News and Rumors
04-05-2024, 10:24 AM
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I love my 70-200 f/2.8 monster of a lens, it's with me at every soccer game I'll photograph for the foreseeable future.
And I also love my 40mm LTD that weighs less than the tripod foot for the 70-200.
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Forum: Pentax News and Rumors
04-04-2024, 03:50 PM
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A similar argument might be that a fixed lens half-frame film camera will only sell to a tiny niche of idiosyncratic photographers interested in revisiting a half-century ago, not nearly enough to turn a profit. But here we are...
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Forum: Pentax News and Rumors
04-04-2024, 07:38 AM
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Your points are valid, I won't aruge with any of that. I was simply trying to address reh321's statement that nobody needs a fast telephoto lens. While you could argue that's true in a strictly literal sense, the fact that every camera system including our own Pentax has a number of these lenses indicates that the want or desire for one is pretty close to a hard requirement.
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Forum: Pentax K-3 III
03-31-2024, 12:11 PM
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Yes, they could do that. But as someone who shoots action and sports with a K-3 Mark III a lot, I've never once used Live View for anything action related except for the occasional video clip. And that's awkward, I'm always squinting to see the screen and none of my normal muscle memory and techniques work.
The camera is built to be an action camera with Pentax' best autofocus using the viewfinder and the systems built around the viewfinder. I don't know that the R&D necessary for pre-capture in Live View, which necessarily has (much) worse AF performance, is going to be a killer app that sells any significant number of cameras.
If they introduced it as a feature in a firmware update I'm sure I'd play around with it, but to me that sounds like trying to shoehorn a mirrorless feature into a DSLR. As for the buffer that's something they could do, I'm not really hampered by it, but it would have to be in a future model. Maybe I'm guilty of a little "Pentax doesn't have it so do I need it"-ism, but I really wouldn't look forward to culling through 120 nearly identical shots to find the few that I really want. 10 or 20 is almost always fine, or so it seems to me.
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Forum: Pentax News and Rumors
12-22-2023, 06:11 AM
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The importance of the 50-135 f/2.8 is that the K-3 Mark III exists. That camera was pretty explicitly marketed as an action and sports camera, with dramatically better autofocus. But Pentax has never had anything you can consider an indoor sports lens on APS-C. A fast-focusing 50-135 f/2.8 is exactly that.
Yes, you could use the 70-200 f/2.8 on APS-C, but 70mm is quite long on the short end for doing things like sports in a gym. You're sometimes a few feet from the action, and 70 isn't going to cut it. The 16-50 is quite short for that case, as the action goes 50-100 feet away. The 55-300 PLM is a good range, and very fast focusing, but the aperture is so small that at decent shutter speeds for action the ISO quickly goes to 10,000 and beyond. Even on the K-3 Mark III that's pushing things.
I know this is a pretty niche use case, especially for Pentax. But at least a few times a year my kids play indoor soccer and I don't really have a lens for that because Pentax doesn't make one.
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Forum: Troubleshooting and Beginner Help
01-26-2024, 01:09 PM
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What does "less proven" mean?
I've proven over roughly five years of use that RawTherapee does everything l need it to do with none of Lightroom's costs. I used to use Lightroom 6, and after a bit of a learning curve RawTherapee was more capable. I can't speak to newer versions of Lightroom, as I haven't used them and probably won't since they don't run on Linux.
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Forum: Pentax News and Rumors
12-24-2023, 05:02 AM
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There was an interview with a Pentax rep sometime in the last year or so where a question was directly asked about a 50-135 replacement and, although they were characteristically vague, it was very clear this wasn't something imminent. It kind of sounded like the project wasn't even started. I'm trying to find the thread, but no luck so far...
Edit: Here's the interview. From August '23. At the end there's this bit:
 Quote: How About Lens Updates With Faster Focus Motors?
DE: On the lens front, I don’t want to get too far into specifics, but there’s a strong general interest in updated designs with faster focus motors, and many, many users are looking for an update to your DA* 50-135mm f/2.8 model in particular. Can you offer them any encouragement that such a lens might be coming? Do you plan to introduce new versions of older lenses with faster PLM focus motors?
KS: I’m sorry, I can’t. At this moment we don’t have a concrete plan for a new lens with a PLM motor. Actually, a PLM-equipped lens cannot be realized without designing a new optical system.
DE: Ah, I understand, you can’t just drop it into an existing design, you need to arrange the optics, and the focus group needs to be smaller or whatever. Got it. I suppose if you want to be optimistic you could think they're working on a new 50-135 with a DC motor, since this only addressed PLM. But I don't think that's what he's hinting.
Given Pentax' pace and resources, my guess is that they're okay with the 16-50, 55-300 PLM, and the 70-200 and 70-210 covering this use case for a good long while.
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Forum: Photographic Technique
03-15-2024, 09:29 AM
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It's focal length dependent. You can usually get better results with shorter lenses than longer. A typical rule of thumb from the film era, or prior to shake reduction, was 1/(focal length). Meaning if you're shooting with a 35mm lens you could count on getting 1/35th sharp. 200mm... 1/200th.
With shake reduction you should be able to do quite a bit better. But even with good SR, shooting much longer than 1/4 second handheld with Pentax IBIS is going to be hit-or-miss. Even with my K-3 Mark III I'd be looking into a tripod at those shutter speeds.
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Forum: Pentax K-3 III
02-02-2024, 07:13 AM
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I don't know, I kind of consider the high ISO quality of the Mark III to be pretty close to miraculous. With the K-30 or the K-3ii ISO 12800 was a last ditch hail mary. It was what you used if it was nearly dark out and you didn't care if it was super noisy and you had to display the results at 640x480 or something. I'd sometimes take nighttime soccer photos at 12800 because I had no other choice, and I'd convert them to black and white just to salvage some kind of result.
On the Mark III that level is now 51,200, or maybe 102,400, while 12,800 looks like ISO 1600 or 3200 with my older cameras.
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Forum: Pentax DSLR Discussion
03-11-2024, 06:02 AM
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Take two equally talented photographers and send them to a football match, an air show, a car race, a basketball game, one with a K-1 and one with a K-3 Mark III. Talk to them and look at the results. And see if anyone still thinks the Mark III is just a glorified teleconverter.
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Forum: Pentax News and Rumors
03-08-2024, 06:07 AM
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I'm quite sure he's well aware of all of that.
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Forum: Pentax News and Rumors
03-09-2024, 04:40 AM
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Yes, all of this. You can take professional photos with a phone. But when I think professional gear, I think a system that can support someone who needs repair and replacement of quality stuff right now so they can keep shooting, because their paycheck depends on it. Canon's Olympic setup is/was kind of crazy and over-the-top, but there's no doubt whatsoever that the photographers shooting the Tokyo Olympics with Canon had the highest level of support. Ricoh/Pentax isn't that kind of company, and as far as I can tell never was. We all know Precision is the only place in the entire US to get official Pentax service, and that even in major metro areas there may not be a single store that stocks Pentax.
The vast majority of us aren't shooting the Olympics for our livelihood, and if you need to replace a 70-200mm f/2.8 lens on an hour's notice at an event or you don't get paid, you don't shoot Pentax unless you personally brought backups of everything. But for high-quality shots that are essentially indistinguishable from some of the best Canon/Nikon/Sony/Leica in most use cases, sure, you can use Pentax.
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Forum: General Photography
03-08-2024, 10:27 AM
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I'm going on a road trip with my teenage boys in a few weeks, and I think my kit is going to be the 15, 21, 40, and 70mm LTDs with the K-3 Mark III in a small Domke bag. Perhaps substituting the 20-40mm LTD for the middle two if the weather looks dicey. Small, light, unobtrusive, will cover most anything except long telephoto.
Limited primes pair wonderfully with the OP's KP. But almost all of these "what lens should I take with me" discussions come down to personal preference.
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Forum: Pentax News and Rumors
03-08-2024, 09:56 AM
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Has Pentax ever been a system supplier for professional use? I wouldn't think so. They've never really catered to that market in the digital age. Serious hobbyists, sure. And I suppose people like wedding and landscape shooters have their needs taken care of well enough to do it professionally. But Pentax certainly never has had the kind of pro support a Nikon, Canon or Sony provides.
A dozen years ago Pentax was the system to get into when you wanted something a little off-beat that punched above its price point. Then it slowly morphed into the somewhat quirky DSLR brand that's moved more up-market. But always for the amateur and advanced amateur markets.
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Forum: Pentax K-3 III
03-08-2024, 07:15 AM
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I believe we're using similar settings. I have Type 1 tracking on, focus sensitivity 5, subject recognition: on. I typically use AF Active Area: Expanded Area AF (S), but occasionally a larger one.
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Forum: Pentax K-3 III
03-08-2024, 05:14 AM
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Ausgezeichnet! Danke. I had to register for the German Pentaxians forum to see your photos, but that's good, there's probably a lot of good content there. And perhaps reading there will help me get a little better with my German, which is pretty poor right now.
It looks like you face many of the same challenges I do with Fußball photography: poor lighting especially at night, leading to compromise shutter speeds and relatively high ISO.
I will have to continue to gain experience and perhaps tweak my autofocus settings when using the 70-200. My kids have another tournament in Virginia this weekend, although rain is in the forecast for Saturday. So we'll see how much photo taking will get accomplished. I trust Pentax weather sealing, but not enough to risk $3000 worth of gear in a downpour.
I think what you're saying is that you use the face- and subject-detection auto modes, which I believe means you have to use the larger (gray) autofocus areas, correct? In my experience that makes it hard to get the camera to focus on the particular subject you want to. It'll usually focus on something, but maybe not the kid you had in mind. How do you deal with that?
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Forum: Pentax SLR Lens Discussion
02-23-2024, 05:47 AM
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With indoor sports like basketball, hockey, futsal fast autofocus is one of the primary requirements. So unless Pentax comes out with a new PLM or DC version of the 50-135 that might not be the best choice.
There are a number of other threads about similar topics, including this recent one about lens selection for youth wrestling. I've often struggled with what lens to pair with my own K-3 Mark III for indoor sports, which for me is mostly futsal/indoor soccer. I don't have a standard range f/2.8 zoom lens, so my work is always about compromises. I will sometimes use the 55-300 PLM, but it's narrow max aperture quickly drives ISO very high. I've also used my 20-40mm LTD, but the narrow zoom range and good-but-not-great focus motor isn't ideal.
And it really depends on where you are able to hang out for the games. If it's a youth tournament where nobody minds if you're right on courtside then perhaps a 16-50 PLM is the most appropriate lens. For futsal I'm often a few feet from the action, and a lens that starts at 50 or 70mm is just too long. But if you're farther up in the stands you may want at least the 24-70 or maybe even the 70-200.
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Forum: Pentax SLR Lens Discussion
03-01-2024, 08:40 AM
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Because indoor sports lighting usually stinks. Even when it looks okay, it's rarely bright enough for 1/1000th. Looking at some recent futsal images I've taken with f/4 or f/5.6 you almost never get lower than ISO 6400 using TAv even when pushing shutter to 1/500 or even slower. Very common to see ISO's over 10,000. The K-3 Mark III can give you decent results at those levels, but wider aperture gives you options, and the ability to freeze action in poor lighting.
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Forum: Pentax Price Watch
02-28-2024, 05:21 PM
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My 70-200 arrived from Map Camera today, a day ahead of schedule and in just three days from order. If you'd shown me this lens without knowing better I would have told you it's new. Not a scratch anywhere, not even on the tripod foot. I've only taken a couple test shots (which looked sharp) but so far Map is impressing the heck out of me. Literally, the price was half of what new costs.
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Forum: Pentax Price Watch
02-27-2024, 04:55 AM
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I've read very good things about Map Camera, and just purchased a Pentax D HD FA*70-200mm F/2.8ED DC from them by way of eBay. It's in transit now. It's due to be delivered Thursday, so hopefully it'll be in as good shape as the photos and description indicate. The prices they have are hard to beat - the lens looks to be in Excellent+ condition and it was half the price of a new one.
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Forum: Pentax SLR Lens Discussion
02-24-2024, 05:03 AM
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Not get nearly as many keepers? There's another guy here who recently posted that he takes photos for his kid's football (soccer) team, and goes home with well over 1000 shots a game. And a large percentage of those are in focus. Now, I think that's over-the-top, I shoot youth soccer and rarely come home with 1/5th of that. But I don't think it's crazy to have over 100 good, in-focus shots of the 15-ish kids on the team over 60-90 minutes. I doubt that was possible with manual focus. Of course pre-autofocus also means you were almost certainly shooting film and if you came home with a couple rolls that was a lot. So you took a very different approach and prioritized what you could get in focus over on-the-fly action.
I have sequences of moving players, including several of my own kids I've printed, that would have been difficult, at best, without the K-3 Mark III's tracking capabilities. I doubt I would have nailed those even with the autofocus algorithms of my K-3 II or K-30.
And I'm not at all being critical of your manual focus abilities and techniques. I'm sure you and others had success with focusing to a spot or a zone, stopping down for greater depth of field, or similar. But just look at professional sports photos like trading cards from 50 years ago. Most of the 1974 Topps set were photos of posed players, with some from set spots like the pitcher's mound or batter's box. Then look at 2024 Topps, and there's much more action out on the field.
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