Wednesday, August 19, 2009

Five day vacation in San Diego with the K-7 and the kit lenses only.

The church facade.


Look what I saw in one of the many gardens!


View from the inside court.


One young child after the Sunday Service.

You can see that the Church has been resurfaced many times.


Gate to one of the gardens.


A long porch leading to yet, another garden.



You can click on the images above to enlarge. Pictures above are all from Mission San Diego.

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Hi pentaxian friends,


I'm sorry that I was not able to post anything for the last seven days. My wife and I went to San Diego for a mini-vacation. I had my laptop but the Hotel we stayed at, which was paid in advance, had problems with the Internet installation and I couldn't get to my blogsite. Life is tough without Internet. How did we ever do anything without it?

Anyway, we're back and here is my first post in a week. I decided that I would only bring the minimum, in terms of photographic equipment, to San Diego. So I brought the K-7, the 18-55mm kit lens and the 50-200mm kit lens. I also brought a Rode Stereo Microphone for attempting to shoot videos with the K-7 and a mini tripod.

I surprised myself and I was able to survive almost a week without my expensive DA and DA* lenses. In fact I often have problems, with front or back focusing, with some of my more expensive lenses. I had no such problem with any of the two lenses. They were spot on every time. The K-7 has the ability to correct distortion such as barrel and pincushion, and also fixes the chromatic aberration. Why the need for very expensive lenses all the times?

The bottom line is that I was able to take pictures as good as I would have with my expensive lenses. I guess that if I were to crop all the above pictures to 100%, there would be a difference. Does cropping to 100% something that needs to be done with every picture? I don't think so, except if you are in the business of testing lenses and equipment.

The image quality of any particular lens is often confused with out-of-focus images. Most of my pictures were taken at f/8 and all were taken at ISO 100. That kept the depth-of-field moderately wide and helped in the accurate focusing. ISO 100 produced the minimum noise, although some images have a little noise due to cropping on some of the images. When I needed bokeh, I used the 50-200mm lens at 200mm.


Imagine if I were a professional photographer...my images could have been fantastic, all with the use of the cheapest Pentax lenses. Go figure!

Tomorrow, I will post the pictures I took, with the same lenses, but at Pacific Beach, near San Diego. Then, I will post some video with stereo sound and music. The K-7 really can do it all.


Thank you for reading.

Yvon Bourque

5 comments:

Kym said...

Nicely done!
Downunder its Tax time... I went to my accountant just over a week ago and should get a nice refund cheque next week ... K-7 time!

Unknown said...

Kym,

Lucky you, it seems like I always have to pay more tax at the end of our fiscal year.

Malcolm Surgenor said...

"the Hotel we stayed at, which was paid in advance, had problems with the Internet installation and I couldn't get to my blogsite."

so are you saying you would have moved hotels just to get internet access!! :-)

Malcolm

Kevint said...

Did you mean you shot at ISO 200. My K-7 doesn't go any lower.

Unknown said...

Yes, your K-7 will shoot at ISO 100 as well. However, you need to have the D-Range Setting deactivated. The Dynamic Range cannot function at just one ISO settings and therefore when activated, the lowest ISO you can set it at is 100 to 200 ISO. The camera should then take the highlights and the shadows from a mix of ISO 100 to 200 or whatever max ISO you set it at. I prefer not using that feature and correct the highlights or shadows in Photoshop.