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Forum: Pentax K-30 & K-50
01-14-2015, 03:19 AM
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I ended up tapping in a small grub screw and also shortening the pin by the same amount. She's fully manual now and seems to work well. Not the most elegant solution, next time I'll try the bent pin option first. The overall quality of the pictures are not a patch on the Tokina mentioned above but I actually bought it for some astro work - of course it's been cloudy since! Many thanks for all your replies.
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Forum: Pentax K-30 & K-50
01-08-2015, 04:45 AM
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OK, so I need to permanently keep that little pin pushed down. Doesn't look like enough metal to the side of the pin to put in a grub screw.... perhaps I could pop the pin out, shorten it, then tap the top part of the hole for a small grub screw to hold pin down....a little fiddly but possibly doable. Any suggestions?
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Forum: Pentax K-30 & K-50
01-07-2015, 09:11 PM
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Forum: Pentax K-30 & K-50
01-07-2015, 08:31 PM
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Hi guys,
Just got a s/h Tasman 135mm 2.8 lens - looks like it's the M42 screw mount with the bayonet adapter. Will this work with the K50? First attempt I didn't seem to be able to get the aperture to close (even with the green button that works with an older pentax smc 50mm lens). If I cannot automatically trigger the aperture mechanism, can I take the screw mounting plate off and somehow jam or lock the pin down to make it a fully manual lens? Cheers - J
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Forum: Pentax Forums Giveaways
12-13-2014, 09:22 PM
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Hell yes I'll confirm my entry. Thanks!
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Forum: Pentax K-30 & K-50
12-13-2014, 03:26 PM
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I have exactly the same lens and it works fine with the K50. Except when it's wide open - at f1.4 it's horribly soft. f2 is MUCH better! Makes a nice astrophotography lens too.
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Forum: Pentax SLR Lens Discussion
12-11-2014, 02:01 PM
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This is a single 5 minute exposure @ ISO 800 with the Sigma 70-300 Zoom. I was about to do some stacking when the clouds abruptly rolled in! Apart from some relatively minor fringing and a bit of ghosting on the brighter stars, I think it's pretty good for a $200 lens. It was around the 200mm mark at f4.5. Windy night with the light pollution just starting to creep in on the raw file - only a little adjustment to the blacks and a smidge more exposure was used. Looking forward to getting my hands on one of the better pentax telephoto lenses.
(manually guided with illuminated cross hairs and 4" f5 acro refractor.)
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Forum: Pentax K-30 & K-50
12-11-2014, 05:48 AM
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I have the same charger and agree wholeheartedly. Well worth the money.
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Forum: Pentax SLR Lens Discussion
12-11-2014, 02:19 AM
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Cheers for that. The CA looks quite acceptable - bit of blue fringing on the brighter stuff. but not the horrible red halos around everything that the 35mm f2.4 gives. Particularly like the photo of Jupiter - the stars are nice and sharp around the field. M33 and M31 are very low on the horizon for me and I can never get a good look at them.
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Forum: Pentax K-30 & K-50
12-11-2014, 12:09 AM
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Messing around with the new K50 and sigma 70-300. Was getting late in the day so fast shutter speeds were out of the question but sort of helps in the 'manic' look!
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Forum: Pentax SLR Lens Discussion
12-10-2014, 09:56 PM
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Has anyone used the DA 200mm f2.8 for astrophotography or night time shots? The reviews seem pretty good except for a bit of CA/fringing on the edges of high contrast objects - this could be a problem at night for stars/lights. I bought the 35mm f2.4 recently which is quite ok during the day but at night, whoa! every star gets a little red halo around it making the whole image go a bit 'pink'! Wouldn't want to make the same mistake with a more expensive lens like the 200mm 2.8 or maybe the 300mm f4.
I've used my 18-125mm for a few night shots with surprisingly good results but it's f5.6 at 125mm which is a little slow for what I'm doing.
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Forum: Pentax K-30 & K-50
12-10-2014, 01:34 PM
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I bought a cheap set of rechargables from the local budget supermarket and only got 50 shots or so out of them which was much less than expected. I then put a set of Eneloops in and got a few hundred photos from them. I suspect it's your batteries. Sanyo Eneloops have a very good reputation and my experience with them has been very positive also. Hobby King also sell some Low Self Discharge NiMH batteries for around $2 ea which I've also found to be pretty true to their marked capacities.
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Forum: Pentax K-30 & K-50
12-10-2014, 01:30 PM
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I've noticed on any of my longer exposure shots at night that there are quite a few 'hot' or bright pixels showing up in the dark areas when looking at the JPEG file on the computer. But if I've saved the RAW file, when I load that into photoshop, the hot pixels are gone. Does the raw file part of photoshop (and it's an old version of Elements) automatically detect and correct hot pixels or is something else going on here?
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Forum: Pentax K-30 & K-50
11-21-2014, 03:53 PM
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Thanks guys. Had a bit of a session last night and some of the photos turned out ok considering I didn't have any guiding rigged up. I've also had to mark or make note of my infinity focus points - I'd forgotten how hard it was to focus the telescope sharply through the viewfinder! The multi exposure seemed to work pretty well and was probably only held back by light pollution. Here's a few of last night's pics... 1st pic's Andromeda. Second, I think that's NGC 672 to the lower left in Aries, 3rd's M42 with the camera attached to the 600mm Orion Apo (about 155 seconds at iso 800) and the last is Orion with the Pentax SMC 1.4 50mm lens (a very old lens with no auto anything but seems pretty good at 2.4 and up.
By the way, any recommendations on good prime lenses for this caper? I'm thinking Sigma's 1.8 28mm might be worth a shot?
---------- Post added 11-22-14 at 09:56 AM ----------
oops...last pic's my 18-125mm sigma DC lens, not the Pentax!
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Forum: Pentax K-30 & K-50
11-20-2014, 11:52 PM
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I occasionally do a little astrophotography with my 1st DS (which is a bit noisy) and have just upgraded to the K50. Been looking at the Multi-exposure mode - has anyone tried this with astrophotography? Does anyone know how the K50 'stacks' the photos? (ie: are they all 50% transparency...)
In the past, I'd usually take 4 or 5 shots of the same thing (on a eq tracking mount) then put them in photoshop and stack them one on top of the other with 50% transparency on the second, 33% on the third photo and 25% on the fourth etc. This reinforces the actual image and reduces the noise. Having seen the multi exposure mode on the k50, I'm wondering if it can do the same thing in camera. ie: take 5 30 second photos at iso800 and allow the camera to 'stack' them with the end result being a much cleaner image with less noise that I can tweak a little harder in photoshop. Not sure if I'm on the right track here or not....
The sensor noise is much, much less evident on the K50 than the 1st DS. With the earlier Pentax, I'd sometimes take lightning photos and if I had the camera open for any length of time (which is unavoidable), then the sensor noise was pretty horrible - the warmer the weather, the worse it got. The K50 looks really clean by comparison so I'm very keen to see what sort of results I can get out of it.
It's an eye opener to see all the different modes and effects on the new model - I think my 1st DS was around $1400au several years ago - for less than half that, the K50 has bigger and better everything! Remind me not to invest in technology!
Cheers,
John
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