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I thought I wrote an article about the Pentax AF-280T flash unit describing what settings work best with the flash. I spend a few minutes searching through the site with no luck. I was making a large number of video overviews today and did one on the AF-280T. I guess that I mentioned an article that only existed in my mind! I’ll fix that post haste…done (see below). Put the camera in Sv, Tv or P mode and the flash in red/green auto mode. Sv mode settings and overview: – Put the camera in Sv mode and modify the ISO to change depth of field. ISO 80 on the K-5 will force the camera to use the largest aperture it can when the flash is powered. I’ve used Sv with my Pentax AF-280T flash with good results. This is the simplest mode to use with the flash as all you will need to control is the ISO setting. It is also the mode I get the best results in without much effort on my part. – Matrix metering is fine. – Set the ISO yourself. – Allow the camera and flash to control aperture and sh...

As I’m sure you have realized by now, I primarily used Pentax equipment. I also spend time reading forums like pentaxforums.com with the lively equipment centric debates. I would like to eventually offer more content on this site for all brands, but I will need to make some connections before that can happen. Well anyways, here is another post about Pentax I was writing up for a forum topic. It deals with Pentax’s recent history and how I see it. I also talk about full-frame digital cameras as that was the topic of discussion. I love talking about Pentax full-frame. I’ll first include some background as how I see it before saying where I think they will go. I think the K-7 and K-x were a positive turning point for Pentax. Both in leadership (Hoya) and focus on the photographic tools they offer. Camera companies are not known to be fast. Even before Hoya showed up there was a shift internally when the K-7 was being developed, so I’d say it was more internal Pentax with some reality chec...

If you haven’t noticed, Pentax will be joining the small sized mirror-less interchangeable lens camera club. There is a lot of information out for the camera excluding sample photos. Here are a few images borrowed from Pentax USA and the USA president Ned’s blog: Now I’ll give some opinion on what I see as the positives and negatives of this new camera and lens system… First off, I’ll go over the negatives to get them out of the way: – As everyone and their brother on the Internet has pointed out, it has a small sized sensor. I’m going to just say wait and see what the quality will be like once full reviews are available. The physical laws of nature can be a harsh mistress though. – The Q is stuck between a rock and hard place considering economics. Digicams and entry level SLRs are cheap. I’m not sure there is much room to fit the Q in due to the small sensor at $800 with a prime lens. I think $800 is well into SLR and mirrorless-large-sensor territory. – An optical viewfinder is only...

If you don’t know, Digital Rev TV is a popular Youtube channel and website that have unique photography related videos. They do goofy things like painting DSLRs from Nikon pink and take new gear out frequently to do theatrical candid sessions or photographing action shots (fighters sparing) with a manual focus micro 4/3rds setup. Just recently they started a contest to find the “Internet’s most talented photographer,” which I though was pretty funny. I didn’t want to enter, because I can’t really imagine what they have in store for the contestants (or can’t afford the taxes on winnings) , but I thought a nice parody video would be fun to make. 2018 Edit: For whatever reason I eventually deleted the video. Sorry! I’ve been cleaning up the site and noticed this dead video link. Another interesting thing about how things change is that Lok and Kai eventually left Digital Rev. They started their own Youtube channels and appear to have found some success. Especially Kai with a large su...

Thanks to David at Camera Craft Inc. in Rockford Illinois, I was allowed to get some shooting time with Pentax’s 645D medium format camera.   Here is a 40 second video clip of the camera in action ( youtube link ): I’m going to go over the camera in bullet points because there are a lot of small things I noticed. Body and usage: – The camera is of course big, but manageable with one hand. The grip portion is offset forward making it easy to hold. – Coming from a K-7 or K-5 you will feel right at home. Everything about the body construction to button placement and menu system, it all has the familiarity of the K-7 and K-5 camera bodies. It even uses the same batteries. – The menu interface seems like a mixture between the K-7 and K-5. I didn’t notice multiple user modes, but maybe that was or will be added in a firmware update. – Useful buttons and switches everywhere. This makes setting changes a snap. – Auto focus type and point selection use dials instead of switches like the K-7...

So according to pentaxforums.com, today is “World Pentax Day” where everyone who has a Pentax camera is asked to participate in uploading photos to the forum gallery. I decided to take some macro photos today with my standard setup. (K-5 is being serviced), so… – K-7 with battery grip. – Custom bracket and adjustable flash cord. – Pentax 100mm f2.8 WR Macro with Kenko 1.5x teleconverter. – Sigma flash with diffuser Here are the best photos of the lot: My technique this time was a little different that previous macro sessions. I used USER mode with the Av setting. My ISO was fixed at either 100 or 400 and while trying various aperture sizes to get the correct amount of in focus area. The lens barrel was completely extended with manual focus set. To take a photo I just moved the whole camera back and forth until I saw the sliver of focus where I wanted it. That way I don’t have to focus on my body movement and lens focus ring at the same time. Flash was set in high speed sync mode and ov...

I just made a second promo video for an Android application called DSLR Star Trails Calculator that I just completed yesterday. It’s a simple yet useful application to give estimates on how to avoid or gain star trails in photos. This application is under my personal business of sorts with a focus on photography. I’ve been wanting to make simple but useful applications that I can utilize in the field to get the shots I want to make. Here is the video: The promo video on YouTube. This was taken with the K-7 at 1536×1024 in 30fps mode (My K-5 is being serviced). That’s one of the reasons I love blogging because I make tutorials like that, which allows me to just follow my previous directions to get a result I’m after. If I had not written down directions I probably would have spend extra time on this video trying to remember what the specific steps were. Even if you don’t write for a blog like I do, you should start writing down important processes somewhere. It helps you stay consi...

I attended a vehicle show at a local church called "Rockford First" today. Every year they have a vehicle show that includes contests, food, music, and events for all ages. It’s nice idea that gives the local community something to do on a weekend and is a positive event all around. So I of course brought my K-7 and DA 14mm f2.8 lens to take some photos of the vehicles on display. There was a nice selection of vehicles at the event. From the new to the old. The shinny to the rusted. Pretty much every style you could think of off hand was represented. Some highlight images of the event: A Nissan GT-R: The highlight of the event for me was the GT-R, which is a halo car for Nissan. All wheel drive, turbocharged, computer controlled, and stock at around 500 hp. I’m not sure I’d personally want one, but it is an impressive car for sure. It has many similar aspects to my favorite car at the moment, the current model Mitsubishi Evolution SE. An amphibious car: The rare car that was ...

I finally completed processing my photos of the Rockford Airfest (Airshow) 2011. Any photographer will tell you that airshows require special care to avoid mounds of extra effort in post processing. This is primarily due to sensor dust and variation of exposure depending on the direction you are taking a photo. Even with new camera bodies that have dust removal mechanisms, it still isn’t enough to avoid the issue due to the extreme nature of photographing distant objects on bright skies. I have a few basic tools to remove dust and attempted to clean my sensor as well as possible before the event, but I wasn’t completely successful at keeping the sensor completely dust free. The second issue was that my K-5 was having issues, which lead me to re-seat the lens a few times as I was trying to diagnose the issue. That meant even more dust would get into the camera body.  The final issue was that while putting spray-type sunscreen on my arms, I managed to get speckles on my DA* 300mm’s U...

I had a request to provide unprocessed full resolution images from the airshow I went to recently where I used the K-5, DA* 300mm f4, and Kenko 1.5x Pz AF teleconverter together. I’ll be providing a few images with 100% crops straight from camera raw default settings for your viewing pleasure. The first image shows some movement blur and how well I did on tracking with AF. This isn’t a representation of absolute sharpness, but rather what type of result you might get in extreme conditions as long as you gained decent focus on the subject: The UPS plane was stationary, so this is a better representation of sharpness (long distance from subject): This person’s t-shirt is also a good representation of sharpness (close distance from the subject):  I still see some motion blur in this shot, but most of the text is readable: Another result which might have benefited from a faster shutter speed: Doing a little math that combination gives me around 680mm in full-frame terms. I think in abs...