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Forum: Pentax SLR Lens Discussion
06-18-2018, 09:48 AM
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Still going through Tokyo pics from January. I took four lenses and ended up using the 18-135 all but exclusively. The first two shots are from Yanaka Cemetery, where the last Shogun is buried, and the other one is a delightful young-at-heart shopkeeper in Yanaka Ginza, an old shopping district not far from the cemetery.
Yanaka Cemetery
Yanaka Cemetery
Shopkeeper in Yanaka Ginza |
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Forum: Pentax SLR Lens Discussion
06-05-2018, 12:42 PM
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I lean toward leaving the branches in but they do seem sort of overbearing to me. Please forgive me for messing with the image--I did a very rough edit to remove the branches in the one instance, which leaves a lot of empty space, and another to partially remove them so they're not sitting directly above the manor. Again, forgive me for taking liberties with it. It's a fine shot as is.
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Forum: Pentax SLR Lens Discussion
06-03-2018, 11:43 AM
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Forum: Pentax SLR Lens Discussion
05-05-2018, 03:02 PM
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Forum: Pentax SLR Lens Discussion
04-11-2018, 10:49 AM
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I almost always shoot in TAv mode, and sometimes pay a price for it--in this case too busy fiddling with both the shutter speed and aperture to get the shots right. Nevertheless, the lens focuses so quickly that the scenes were mostly salvageable even though the composition suffered.
Duck!
Ducks |
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Forum: Pentax SLR Lens Discussion
03-30-2018, 04:17 PM
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Really good example of the lens. It's my favorite walking-around lens. Great range, weather-resistant and when used under the right conditions, really good image quality. And I've got good stuff from it under considerably less than ideal conditions--night shots, concert lighting and the like.
Words I never expected to see in the forums: "while my friend Dave retrieved his falcon."
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Forum: Pentax SLR Lens Discussion
03-16-2018, 07:39 PM
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Well, I suppose "good" is arguable. And it's not a real hummingbird. A neighbor round the block is married to a woman who owns an antiques/collectibles/whatever shop, and he puts the overstock to good use. These were all shot wide open, and the lens delivered the foreground admirably. Obviously did some processing which brought the backgrounds down when I did the b&w conversions, but the bokeh was pronounced out of the camera. It's just a great, liberating walk-around lens.
Eternally mute hummingbird
Shots from a neighbour's yard
A spokes person
Shots from a neighbour's yard
Silence of the fawns
Shots from a neighbour's yard |
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Forum: Pentax SLR Lens Discussion
03-12-2018, 10:47 AM
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I love the closeup shots people get out in the water, but there are those occasions when swimming or paddling out just isn't an option :). Somewhere amid the impending carnage here, I think 4th from the right, is 11-time world champion Kelly Slater. I shot this with a 400mm generic manual focus lens, and you can see how a longer lens like the Sigma zooms or the new Pentax long zoom released for the K-1 would come in handy on what was a very but not uniquely big day. I was down on the shore, and most of the shooters were on higher ground 25 yards or further back from my position. I'm not a birder except for the occasional moment when one perches near me, but yeah, a lot of exotics here including many imports. We have fairly large flocks of green parrots consisting of escapees and their descendants, for instance, and I caught an image of what I later learned was a white-rumped shama, either an escapee or progeny, when it landed on a branch about 10 feet away from my 100mm f/2.8 WR and obligingly sat there for a bit.
Anyway, looking forward to your other Big Island shots. I don't get over there often. The black sand beaches are great, we don't have any here.
30 feet plus at Waimea Bay
White-rumped shama |
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Forum: Pentax SLR Lens Discussion
03-10-2018, 07:29 AM
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Forum: Pentax SLR Lens Discussion
03-10-2018, 07:14 AM
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I live in Hawaii, on Oahu, and the 18-135 is on my camera way more than any other lens. One situation that does call for a long lens is wintertime surf on the North Shore (the north shores of all the islands, pretty much) when the big waves are breaking quite a ways out. I've often wished a Bigma or some other great honking beast of a lens would materialize in the car on my way out there. Anyway, good choice, nice work, always a pleasure to see people enjoying our little outpost here.
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Forum: Pentax SLR Lens Discussion
01-15-2018, 04:55 PM
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Thanks. It was 135mm at f/5.6. I was very happy with the depth of field.
I got the Tamron to replace the 18-135 for shooting in the low and often confused lighting of rock/pop concerts. It balks at focusing where I want it to focus often enough that I get frustrated, because there's so little room for error with the shallow depth of field. The low-light performance is better in consistent lighting but still lapses sometimes and focuses more slowly than the 18-135. I didn't want to spend any time on the trip being frustrated with anything but my own failings so I left it at home. More like an irritating employee than a member of the family :)
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Forum: Pentax SLR Lens Discussion
01-15-2018, 07:59 AM
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I'm in Tokyo for a bit. I brought three lenses: the 18-135, the slow sigma 10-20, and the Pentax f/2.8 100mm macro WR. I've been here two weeks and haven't put the other two on the camera yet, although I did lug the sigma around for a day with every intention of using it. I've had things to do most days so I've mostly been shooting street stuff in the late afternoons or evenings. I'm sort of kicking myself for not bringing the Tamron 28-75mm f/2.8, but we had a quarrel before I left so it stayed home. Anyway, some random shots from around the city. I think the lens acquitted itself really well at night considering the lack of speed. Much credit to the K-3 also.
Young woman displaying the wares at a cotton candy shop in Harajuku, a young people's fashion redoubt.
1/50 @iso 1600
Harajuku cotton candy girl
Ueno Station is one of the larger hubs in the Tokyo rail system.
1/15 at @iso 1600
Ueno Station by night
Also in Harajuku
1/60 @iso 1600
Alice & friend in Harajuku, Tokyo
My favorite shot of the trip to date, from the cemetery in which the last shogun is memorialized.
1/50 @iso 200
Crow residing at Yanaka cemetery,
Kanamachi Station is the nearest rail stop to where I'm staying.
1/30 @iso 1600
Train passing Kanamachi Station |
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Forum: Pentax SLR Lens Discussion
12-20-2017, 03:38 AM
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Was waiting for a friend outside the municipal building in downtown Honolulu when this photogenic little troupe sat down on the bench opposite me.
Grandma and cuties |
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Forum: Pentax SLR Lens Discussion
11-30-2017, 03:35 AM
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Forum: Pentax SLR Lens Discussion
11-30-2017, 03:13 AM
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Just looked at the color version on flickr; you really did a great job with the monochrome conversion and edit.
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Forum: Pentax SLR Lens Discussion
10-24-2017, 12:01 AM
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This is a pretty good "what it can do" example I think. Shot at 135mm with the popup flash at -3, mid-afternoon from maybe eight feet away with a dark-colored car about that same distance behind the cat. With the rapid drop off from the flash and the lens wide open and zoomed all the way in, what there was of the car in the picture basically disappeared. I took the background down some more to make the car go away completely when I did the black and white conversion, but it's 98% the product of the lens and the flash setting--you really had to strain to see the car bumper in the RAW file. The cat (cross-posted from K-3 thread) was in the parking lot outside the grounds of the Buddhist temple in the second shot.
Byodo-in Temple cat
Byodo-in Temple |
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Forum: Pentax SLR Lens Discussion
10-18-2017, 03:36 PM
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Yeah, a four-master with stealth technology :) Thanks for the kind words, Des. They're not to everybody's taste but I really enjoy working on them.
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Forum: Pentax SLR Lens Discussion
10-18-2017, 01:17 PM
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We had two tall ships in port over the weekend, one a Mexican navy training ship (Cuauhtémoc) and the other a Chilean navy training ship (Esmeralda). I never found the Esmeralda; don't know where they hid a 400-foot four-masted ship but it wasn't at any of the piers in town or at Pearl Harbor. The Mexican crew were welcoming visitors to the ship so I went aboard and got a nice shot of the Cuauhtémoc's mainmast. Shooting straight up into a bright sky midafternoon, got some purple and green fringing but nothing irreparable. The cloud shot was a couple hours later from my place. Both were 18mm. It was the usual one-lens excursion, with shots ranging from wide to tight.
Clouds
Cuauhtémoc mainmast
Ensign Reyes |
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Forum: Pentax SLR Lens Discussion
10-13-2017, 04:28 AM
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Really nice 3-D pop on these. I don't know why exactly but the butterfly especially strikes me.
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Forum: Pentax SLR Lens Discussion
10-12-2017, 09:54 PM
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Yeah, they look good. I was fooling around with the green mode on the K-3 a week or so ago taking some sunset pictures, and when I got home I was surprised to find one the camera decided to shoot at f/39, which I had no idea was even possible with this lens. It didn't look anywhere near as good as yours :)
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Forum: Pentax SLR Lens Discussion
10-10-2017, 04:03 AM
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One of the reasons I convert so many of my shots to black and white is that I'm somewhat color challenged and the monochrome lets me work with elements like contrast and tone and structure without fretting whether I'm warping out the colors somehow. I couldn't really find any advantages to converting this one--it just looks better to me in color no matter what. Anyway, this is the cruise ship Maasdam leaving Honolulu Harbor en route to Pago Pago, one of those serendipitous shots resulting from having the camera in the car and, in this instance, running ahead of time to pick my son in law up from work.
Maasdam at sunset |
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Forum: Pentax SLR Lens Discussion
10-01-2017, 03:19 AM
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I have a Tamron 28-75mm f/2.8 I got for concerts and other less than optimal lighting situations, and I left it on the camera for a couple of weeks after the last concert I shot. It was a constant low-level irritant, not wide enough, not long enough, finicky autofocus, except for one time stopped at a traffic light I got a good handheld night shot of the local Ferrari/Maserati franchise I couldn't have got with the 18-135mm. Anyway, I finally put old reliable back on the camera where it will stay for the nonce. Same day for all these*, divergent circumstances with focal lengths unavailable on the Tamron.
24mm
Diamond Head
100mm
Jeep full of blondes in my rear view mirror
18mm
Chinatown Honolulu
78mm
Chinatown Honolulu
118mm
Chinatown Honolulu
The last shot I got this nice compressed depth of field effect with the canopy at the back of the frame, which is across a three-lane street from where I was standing behind the shoppers. There's really not a lot you can't get this lens to do if you ask nicely.
*not the same day. First two on the same day, the rest on the next day. They're all starting to blur together :)
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Forum: Pentax SLR Lens Discussion
09-22-2017, 07:25 PM
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Nice shot, conveys well the ambiance of the place. It's livable, too, not one of those hotels that are too toney for comfort.
While we're at it, here's a night shot of the exterior and points east. Again from the Sheraton, I think from one of the rooms.
Waikiki by night |
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Forum: Pentax SLR Lens Discussion
09-20-2017, 02:09 AM
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