Hi Team, I finally managed to get out in the bush for a few hours yesterday to test shoot with my new *ist D and I've just finished assembling a small gallery of the results. Be warned the gallery contains images of flowers but since they are all local indigenous varieties in their natural habitat it could be considered as a botanical study :-)
I decided to keep the afternoon casual by just venturing out with the camera and a single fixed lens. The only other items that I took were a spare set of freshly charged batteries that I didn't have to use in any case (battery life seems pretty good from my limited experience to date). My trusty old SMCP A50/2.8 Macro was the lens of choice for the day. It was pretty windy so a tripod was of little use and since I had no intention of stuffing around with flash or reflectors I figured that it would give me the best compromise for DOF vs shutter speed at the cameras lowest EI of 200. So all the shots in this gallery are hand held and most are shot with the wind tossing the subjects about, nearly all are of acceptable sharpness but many could have benefited from deeper DOF. The A50/2.8 macro has sufficient sharpness that only from f11 to f22 is some softening visible when shooting in conjunction with the *ist D and at all aperture it shows very little chromatic aberration at the edges of the frame. Most shots were made at macro ranges and one was shot 1:1, all images were shot at EI200 and at the Daylight WB setting in order to preserve colour accuracy. I had full sun all afternoon so the shots were either made in full sun or in the shadows of the surrounding foliage. The colour or contrast of the gallery images hasn't been modified. The EXIF exposure data has been retained in the resized images for anyone who would like to view shutter/aperture details. Since I don't yet have my portable mass media storage solutions in place as yet I was forced to save the images in camera as minimum compression jpg files. Upon reviewing my images on my work-station I now appreciate the need to shoot in RAW mode when using the *ist D. The image highlights appear to saturate far earlier than I was used to when I shot with my old Oly E-10, I guess the *ist D must have a harder curve in its transform algorithms. Overall I'm fairly satisfied with the camera from an image capture stand-point although I know now that I'll definitely end up shooting RAW most of the time and I do miss using the lens aperture ring. Also regardless of the finder mag I did find it somewhat less friendly to focus than my LX or MZ-S bodies. The FL mag has me now wishing for a nice new wide AL macro lens too :-) Comments and unbridled criticism welcome. http://www.home.aone.net.au/audiobias/wildflowers/ Cheers, Rob Studdert HURSTVILLE AUSTRALIA Tel +61-2-9554-4110 UTC(GMT) +10 Hours [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://members.ozemail.com.au/~distudio/publications/ Pentax user since 1986, PDMLer since 1998
