In Pentaxland we call it LBA/CBA (lens/camera-buying addiction).
I now have:
Bodies:
Pentax Spotmatic SP1000 (screwmount manual body)
Pentax K1000 (k-mount manual body)
Pentax ZX-7 (k-mount AF body)
Pentax MZ-5n (k-mount AF body)
Pentax K20D (k-mount digital body)
AF Lenses:
Pentax DA 18-55mm AL II kit lens
Pentax DA 55-300mm
Pentax DA 35mm f/2.8 Ltd. Macro
Pentax FA 50mm f/1.4
Promaster (Tamron rebadge) 28-105mm (for the AF film cameras)
Quantaray (Sigma rebadge) 100-300mm (for the AF film cameras)
I had the Pentax MV and the Pentax ME super. I realised what was happening after I'd bought the extra hand-grip motor-drive, big flash unit, slave flash.. and eventually stopped. I never looked more belts'n'buckles Mr gadget-man than my old Pentax days
I definitely need to sell the ZX-7, the M42 Vivitar zoom, and the SMC-M 50mm f/2. I guess the Vivitar 28mm k-mount, too. It's pretty crappy (the kit zoom is better).
The rest I'm pretty comfortable with.
Wouldn't mind adding a Pentax Super Program and a few more Limited primes.
edit: I guess five lenses in the 50-58mm range is a bit ridiculous, though.
Yesterday after work I played around with the Jupiter-9 (Soviet-era 85mm f/2 preset screwmount lens) a bit for the first time. Noticed that the fit on the K20D (using the genuine M42->K adapter) is slightly loose/wobbly (same complaint a lot of pentaxforum users have had about some Helios 44 models, I guess).
I also found the preset to be a lot easier to use than I'd anticipated. I love the fluidity of the aperture in this setup.
Some of these will look familiar from the DA 35mm post. Trying to shoot the same subjects when testing out lenses.
hehe yeah, I know.. but I was only 5ft from the wall and using a 105mm portrait lens. I just wanted to see how well Photoshop handled the merge of a bunch of random photos covering the area.
I still haven't figured out the bracketing on the D1x. I know where it is etc, but it just doesn't seem to take photos in a bracketed sequence. I'm stumped
Hey cool, Sam. Sort of like those gigapan shots (remember the Obama inauguration photo posted a while back.) I've actually been wanting to try that out, stitching photos together taken at the long end of my zoom. But I haven't tried to do any stitching actually.
@Blackout, take a look at the very last image that DWB posted, the fence with the blurry tree in the background. By getting out of the Program mode of the camera and into the Aperture Priority mode, you could have done something similar with those swings and having the building and other stuff in the background blurred and less distracting. Aperture Priority is just a semi-auto, or semi-manual depending on how you want to think of it, mode and all you are doing is selecting one single setting while the camera figures out the rest. Thus there's no extreme mindboggling concepts to think about.
Aperture plays a big part of getting that fence shot that DWB got. It's a matter of setting a wide aperture (low number) in aperture priority mode and the camera will set the shutter speed for you just as it would in the mode you used there. It would allow you to be a bit more creative while still being pretty easy to figure out.
Just a thought to help you out. Once you get out of auto or Program mode, the creative possibilities are only limited to the range of your camera/lens combinations.
And I'll have some stuff to post tonight after the kids head to bed and I have time to upload.
Yeah, thanks. It's true that aperture mode would have been better there. Usually use it for when I need to take a picture of a person and there is a lot of stuff happening on the backround. But yeah, just learning my stuff, I think I'm usually just focusing on the two dimensions af the picture and forget the depth too often. I just like the lighting in the picture and the lens flair, which is a bit silly really.
That picture was just some quick ones I took before we left the place, the real reporter I worked with today was on the phone so I just got out of the car and took some pictures in the meantime. I'm an awful noob with this but my pictures can seen by about 7000 people on the local paper twice a week. Again, very silly.
Yeah, I typically shoot my little cam in full manual mainly because of not having separation between exposure lock and focus lock (both stuck on the half shutter button push), but moving to Aperture priority is the perfect next step to move to away from Program which is more of an auto mode than the A, S, and M modes.
I certainly wish my camera was capable of nice DOF like that. I typically do everything at an f/3.5 aperture which is my widest available. It also happens to be more equivalent to an f/8 on a dSLR, thus not much DOF unless I can really fine tune the focal distance, subject distance, and background distance and get them perfect.
On that note, I have this interesting little display down the road from me shown here....
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This is just out in the middle of nowhere along side a major road. I have no idea what it is, but I do see a guy there now and then adding stuff. I've been wanting to catch the guy to ask permission but haven't really seen him since starting the interest in photography. So, I was out shooting (same time I shot the bridge posted last night) and thought, the heck with it, I'm just stopping. Unfortunately, it was at the time of crotch deep snow and I didn't want to be trudging through all that. I got a few shots off and plan on stopping again now that the weather is getting nicer. There is so much in old signs and other "junk" to shoot here I could probably spend hours. I especially want to see what is inside the little shack.
So, here are a handful of shots with the snow. Quite a few for a single post actually.....
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And finally, these are my 3 favorites of the shoot....
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11.
Ouch, didn't realize there were 11 shots until I went through and numbered them.
Can sorta see the limitations of the lens there in a couple shots (bad CA) but aside from that your p&s seems to perform quite admirably. (And good pp work, of course.)
