Huge Moon With Mirror Lens and 2x Teleconverter

At the photography swap meet the other day I was lucky enough to pick up a Sigma 70-300 macro (to replace my 70-200, or so I tell myself (and my wife)) and my prize, a 500mm Mirror Lens and T-to-K mount converter so it would fit on my K20D. The mirror lens is great, huge reach, tiny price, weight, and length. The thing is about the length of the DA16-45 and a third the weight.

Of course, it's got it's bad sides. Fixed aperture at f-8.0, hard to stabilize without a tripod (though a big "yay" in the K20D shake reduction column), distinctive donut bokeh, and not the best image quality. Mine is a Japanese version that I doubt is anywhere near the quality of the Tarmon in th elink above. However, it's my first long lens and I'm having a blast playing with it! And what's the first thing you do with a long telephoto? Yup, take pictures of the moon! In my case I was a masochist and put a 2x teleconvert on the body first, so I had that to contend with.

However the results are worth it. The moon, low on the horizon appears huge in the viewfinder. Below is a shot straight out of the camera with no cropping. Minor whitebalance and converted from RAW, but that's it.

1/90th @ f-8.0, ISO 3200 1500mm equiv

The most amazing thing to me is the zoom. Whenever I see a great moon shot I generally ask how much cropping was done, and mostly it's a fair amount, like 60%. The shot above, 0% cropping. Sorry for the shadow in front, that's a branch from the neighbors tree which I did my best to avoid, but as this was a quick and dirty run-out-before-bed session, this has less foliage than some of the other ones :) Click on the image to see a larger version. Zoomed all the way in it's not great, yet it still shows nicely full size on the monitor. A bit of noise-ninja helps for the 100% view as well, however I think you're only going to get so far with a less than stellar lens and a less than stellar teleconverter!

Now I have to get to bed if I want my 5 hours of sleep tonight...

Tips From The Manual (Or Not!): Quick ISO Setting

Long time no post, it's been a rough couple of weeks in The Real World^(tm) but I wanted to come back and provide a couple of K20D tips that you may or may not know, depending on whether you read the manual or not (always highly recommended!).

First one is for quick access to the ISO setting. On my *ist-D the only way to change the ISO setting was to put the camera down, set the left top dial to ISO, adjust it with the right e-dial, set the left top dial back, and return the camera to your eye (and it never was shown in the viewfinder!). On the K20D I thought that the procedure was a bit more streamlined... you hit the function button, hit the right arrow, select the ISO, and hit OK. Not bad, but not great.

What you'll find on page 79 of the manual is that if you hold down the "OK" button and adjust the front e-dial, you can adjust the ISO setting. No taking the camera from your eye, and the ISO shows up (at least temporarily, depending on what your custom fuction for ISO in the viewfinder is set to). Nice and quick!

Now there are a couple of caveats to this. If you have the custom functions for your e-dials set to adjust ISO via the custom functions (Page 74) in Sv/Tv/Av mode the OK+e-dial shortcut won't work in these modes, you'll only be able to use the e-dial you set via the custom menu.

Hope this little tip helps you out!

Lightroom 1.4.1 Update

Looks like Adobe has released a new Lightroom update... 1.4.1 which fixes issues with DNG conversion and the timestamp issues they had with the previous update. This will bring a working copy of Lightroom which supports the new K20D RAW format (.PEF) into the world. Various blogs around the net have full(er) coverage of what is fixed and improved.

A Lightroom 2.0 Beta Review

I was going to write up a pretty Lightroom 2.0 Beta review, however there are so many out there already, it doesn't make sense! Check out this one over at Computer-Darkroom to start with.

Patrick Smith Photography Inspiration

Shepherdpics posted about their photographer of the month and posted a link to Patrick Smith Photography, which I spent some time going through, and must say it's fantastic work. Patrick's methods page is of particular note, as he has lots of examples of what makes and doesn't make a fantastic landscape image.

The Joys of Old Lenses

One of the things I loved about my *ist-D and which has translated over to the K20D is the fact that I can use any Pentax lens. This was one of the selling points when I was first looking at the 'D' in that dad had given me a couple of lenses with my first SLR (a Pentax P30T) so the cost of the 'D' body was around the same cost as buying the Canon Rebel (the other body I was considering) and an uber image stabalized lens. The size and feel of the Pentax won out in the end obviously.

With the K20D not only can I use any of these lenses still, and they are now all magically image stabilized! Of course, the benefits of in-body stabilization vs. lens only stabilization is a discussion that can go on for hours, mostly it seems that those with it in their chosen brand say it's great, those without it rail against it and talk about the benefits of lens-only.

I will continue to ignore all this of course, and shoot as much as I can with the benefits of image stabilization on random 20+ year old lenses :)

Squamish Chief Teaser

Just a quick teaser until I finish the images from my walkaround in Squamish today. Got lots of potentially usable shots from Shannon Falls as well as a couple of other locations. Weather wasn't great, mostly grey and "bleah" (the technical term) and raining for a fair amount of the time. The mood can be helped in some of the shots with a black and white conversion and a bit of high-contrast "Ansel Adams"-y treatment.

I have to say that the K20D is a monster in the file size department! Some of the panoramas I'm stitching together are 400mb .psd files! I've had to reduce some as Lightroom will only accept 10,000 x 10,000 as the maximum size for importing as well. It's glorious to know that I could zoom to 1:1 and see amazing detail in the rocks and trees.

Anyway, I hope to finish off some more processing tomorrow and shall post more then.