The K2 Can, too!

Pentax's K line originally had four models -- the most film models the K line ever had. The K1000, KM, KX, and K2. Let me sidebar here for a minute and talk directly to Pentax. Pentax, who picks your names for you? They're so hard to follow! Why is the K-5 better than my K-7? What is there a K-x DSLR when there was already a KX back in the 70s? Why suddenly jump to the K-30? The K-8 trough K-29 were never released. Nikon has the right idea. D1. D2. D3. D4. That's a brilliant pattern, Pentax.

Okay, through that, the K2 was the top of the Pentax K film body line, but, I believe, the shortest-lived. The light meter in it is great -- as good as the Nikon F3 in my eyes. Also, the usability is simply and photographer-oriented. The whole K line is brilliant, but the K2 was a great flagship. So I always look forward to taking one of my K2s out. This week I took the black bodied K2 out (my chrome K2 is finally being repaired for it's stuck mirror and should be ready for use again as early as next week.) For those of you with broken or neglected Pentax film SLRs who want to get them fixed, I used www.pentaxs.com . Great service quality and turn-around time. He fixed my H3V and brought it back from unusable. I'm excited and hope to get through all my Pentax cameras with them because, with as much as they get used, new light seals and general cleaning will help a lot.

Anyway, I took my black K2 and my Samyang 18-28 back to the Trans America pyramid. Last time I used the Samyang was on the KX and was at Trans America. However, this time I focused on the park next to the building instead of the building.

Blue Filter, Happy Results

MY Sigma 35-80 is definitely my most versatile Pentax lens, my favorite lens, and definitely in my top five lenses. My main goal for this shoot was to test how the Ilford P4 responds to a blue filter. Monday we saw the results with a CPL. Yesterday, a yellow filter. Yesterdays images were above average for a single-days run. The yellow filter certainly contributed to that. The blue filter reduced contrast on this shoot because the evening light was at the peak-blue time right before the sun began turning everything red. But some of the results came back nicely anyhow, especially the Millennium Tower shot.


1/250th, f4. Locks. I wonder what it means?


1/125th, f22. Millennium Tower. So this image is somewhat of a success. The main question is why? First, you may need to know what Millennium Tower looks like. Check that out here. Blue glass drapes the tower. A blue filter will lighten blue colors. Millennium Tower's blue curtain is already light blue, so the Tiffen 80A blue filter will further lighten it on monochrome film. The reflection on the lower left corner made that area of the tower less blue, darkening it on the final image.


1/60th, f4. One of my favorite sculptures in The City, this is an incredibly detailed tribute to the working man. I love that it's also in the middle of the financial district.


1/60th, f4.


1/30th, f4.

K-7 Building Photographs, Day Three of Three

Stitched together from four photos. A basic photomerge just to increase image size and resolution slightly. Cropped to cut out a fence and port-a-john.


Stitched together from 34 or so photos taken at 50mm from across the street. Main problems include the horizon sloping dramatically upwards to the right, a trade-off for the building being vertical. Also keystoned to reduce the amount the building swoops away from the camera.

The building looks good in terms of color balance, and the sky here is fabulous, but ultimately this photo suffers from other technical issues which make it an unsuccessful photo. Namely, the street moving upward and the barricades around the building. Photographing buildings in a construction zone is difficult, yes. In fact, it shouldn't be done for any sort of high-quality purposes. Additionally, the building isn't actually vertical, but to make it vertical would make the road appear to be steeply uphill and the white building on the side to be falling over.

There may be a way to correct that in Photoshop, but if so I couldn't find it.

For the sky, I copied the sky with a wand mask and re-pasted it. Then I dropped the gamma to about .1 or .2 and made the transparency 50%. So that had a nice effect.

This day's photos reiterate my point from Monday: A photo captured badly in the camera can't be made great with editing and processing. So the whole point of that to you who take photographs is: get as much right in the camera as possible. For you who enjoy seeing photographs, there's a lot of effort in capturing a good shot well before it's processed and well before you see it.

Rain and a Bronze Photographer

Last week I stumbled across a sculpture called "Smile." Here are some shots worth sharing.


Smile is a bronze, I think, statue that is so intricately detailed -- down to the pores on the statue's 'skin', that I had to touch it a few times to make sure it wasn't a street performer.


It's as though he's telling me to get out of his photo.


Check out the detail on the hand holding the camera. This is one of the most impressive sculptures in San Francisco.


Smile.

Fantastic Day with an Amateur Camera

I've had mixed feelings about my dad's old camera gear. The lenses he bought are great -- best versions of each of the Vivitars. And the kit 55mm Mamiya lens is also very good. But the old Mamiya/Sekor DTL1000 I've had problems using. I find the interface to be cumbersome and the size overly bulky. But the results from last Thursday indicate that this camera is equally capable of recording quality shots when compared to any of my Nikons, Pentax, or Canon cameras. The TMax roll had 41 frames on it. I may have not been paying attention when I rolled it. So I had about 75% more frames than normal and a larger chance of catching some good shots. That said, the good shots I captured were some of my best this year. Also indicating that this camera works very well with the Takumar 55mm f1.8.


1/125th, f1.8. Photographing a sticker of a photographer photographing you. That's a lot of photographing.


1/30th, f11. Dark sky due to a negative processing error, but the effect is nifty. When the film was loaded on the developing reel, the negative was touching another negative, so the emulsion did not develop properly. That leaves the darkened area seen in this image.


1/100th, f1.8. Some purple flowers to test this lens' ability to take close-up shots.


Full second, f16


1/500th, f1.8. Focus is a bit off, but in my defense from the time I raised the camera to the time I shot the image -- including focusing, was the time it took him to begin his jump and get to the zenith.


1/60th, f1.8. I'm pleased enough with this shot to keep it. Lining it up to be perfectly symmetrical posed a challenge, but it seems that the Embarcadero Place architects must have wanted the flower sculpture to line up exactly with the tower.


1/30th, f1.8. Hyatt in downtown San Francisco


1/30th, f2. Also the Hyatt. There are two ways to photograph buildings: Straight on or at an angle. If you elect to use an angle, don't make it look like an accident. Go big or don't both. So I attempted a fiarly extreme angle here after the previous shots had been straight on.


1/30th, f1.8.


Because I expected this roll to only have about 27 frames, I stopped keeping track of the shots after frame 29 (the above image) expecting that each one would be the last and that it would not turn out.

Had you asked me a week ago if I felt a 55mm lens was well suited for architecture photography, I'd have said no. I think of this lens as a good portrait and close-up lens. However, it has good resolving ability and would is very well suited to architecture.

F3 Delivers Again

My Nikon F3 has become one of the three most important cameras in my collection, behind my K1000 -- the first SLR I ever owned -- and my Pentax K-7. In fact, I like my F3 so much that I've decided to get a second DSLR this year, a Nikon D5100 or D300 (The jury is still out on whether I want to use my NAI lenses on a DSLR.) That said, the F# does have one small issue -- the LCD in the viewfinder is dead so I never know what shutter speed I'm shooting, just the aperture. This was also my first outing with Efke 35mm film. Currently, my favorite film lineup goes a bit like this in 35mm:

1- Efke 100 ISO
2- Pan-x 125 ISO
3- TMax 400 ISO
4- Everything else.

That will change as I use different films. For instance, I want to use Adox in 35mm as well as Fuji Acros. And I suspect that with the right conditions Ilford 50 ISO would be a very enjoyable film to shoot. As for today's photos, I hope that you'll be plenty pleased. This roll returned some of the best results I've gotten this year. The F3 tends to do that.


f3.5. A long exposure, though. It was somewhat overcast at the beginning of my walk, and drizzly.


f11. A fountain in a courtyard area.


f22. I wonder what the heck that is.


f11. Well that helps a little. Actually, no it doesn't. I was just lying there.


f5.6 Oh, of course. Those were interior shots of the sculpture Icoaspirale. Why didn't I guess that the first time?

This sculpture falls soundly into the "I don't get it, but I really like it" category. Were the inside inaccessible, it would be a much different piece and much weaker for it.


f8. A seagull searching for french fries.


f11. Another seagull searching for french fries. Seagulls, I may have mentioned before, are disease bags. But they're okay in my book because they like fries.


f16. Let's just appreciate this image a moment. It's not going to win any prizes, nor will anyone ever hang it on a gallery wall. But it conveys the Efke film's quality in a clear, and appreciable way. When I upload images to my holding pen in Picasa, I shrink them to 1000 pixels wide by about 630 tall (depending on the image.) As a baseline, the longest dimension is 1000 pixels. This makes the images between .6 and .8 megapixels. I also compress them to 10, which makes them all about 150KB. Posted on this page, they're further reduced to 550 pixels wide. All that resizing and downgrading and this image has not gained grain or noise, lost meaningful image quality, nor developed strange jpeg artifacts. A lot of the credit rests with the film, and you can see from the water and the first boats that this film records great detail. In addition, the tonal range here is in balance in a way that would make histogram peepers drool. This film is an amazing film. If you ever shoot film, buy one roll of this and try it. This was $6 for 36 exposures. I actually got 28 on the roll. With the right camera, you may get 39 or 40. An amazing number of photos and only $6 for the roll, or so. Just a superb film. I hope it never goes out of production.