On Tue, Feb 23, 2010 at 4:49 PM, Larry Colen <l...@red4est.com> wrote: > As I've mentioned, John was kind enough to loan me his 16-50 for > photographing belt tests at my dojo. I must say that I really like the > lens. > > I took some time yesterday afternoon to practice with it which was very > helpful as I learned how to take advantage of things like the quickshift > focusing. Being able to choose, on the fly between manual and auto focus is > a very big help. > > I was also quite impressed with the speed of the autofocus. Autofocus seems > a lot more usable on it than on a lot of my other lenses. Then again it may > have been more of a case of subjects dressed in black and white in the > middle of an empty floor. Even so, there are some shots where it looks like > it may have focused on the lines on the floor where the mats join with each > other. Or that may be a case where I prefocused, locked focus and the > subjects moved, as folks practicing martial arts are wont to do. > > The lighting last night was less challenging in that I wasn't shooting into > a lightsource. On the other hand with just overhead lights I had to push the > ISO and shutter speed a lot harder to get the exposure. I'm not completely > satisfied with the image quality I got last night, but I still think I got > some usable shots, and if it was easy, then anyone could do it. > > I'm putting the photos from all the days of testing into one collection: > http://www.flickr.com/photos/ellarsee/collections/72157623371212307/ > > 100220 were shot Saturday about noon with various primes mostly around f/3.2 > 100222 were shot Monday evening with the 16-50 wide open at f/2.8 > > All of the photos were shot using a monopod. > > If anyone has any suggestions or tricks for getting things to come out > clearer, I'm very interested. > > As an aside, after giving one of my prints to a friend, I called up another > friend I used to work with at the same place to tell him to check it out. It > turns out that he was taking a break and doing a little photowalk on the > Coyote Creek trail. So, I grabbed the K20 and 16-50 and headed out to > practice. JB had his D700 and 70-210. There were a couple of times where > we were discussing shots where my lens was too short and JB let me take a > couple of frames with his camera. One thing that I noticed in retrospect > was that his camera just got the exposure right, so he just left it on auto > exposure, where with the K20, my routine is hit the green button, do a test > shot, and correct. I may leave it there for a while, but as soon as the > lighting changes I have to readjust. > > Granted, there have been a few times that the histograms and blinkies have > shown blown highlights on my camera that ended up not being much of a > problem once I processed the raw. If I could get those to work with the raw > data rather than the in camera jpegs, I might trust the autoexposure > metering a lot more.
200 shots (more or less) is a heck of a lot to look through, but the three or four that I opened looked more than passable to my eye. cheers, frank -- "Sharpness is a bourgeois concept." -Henri Cartier-Bresson -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
