On Tuesday 28 December 2004 11:36, Shel Belinkoff wrote: > Thanks for your comments, Luigi ... > > I just don't understand why so many digi users love to mention how many > hundreds or thousands of exposures they've made. �Most are probably > worthless pap made just to "see what happens" �Reminds me of when I got my > little Sony - I took snaps of everything - the heater vent, my foot, fifty > snaps of the tree out front - all of which were worthless other than to > quell the excitement of having a new camera that could take lots of pics > without film.
I take an awful lot of concert action pictures of local rock bands. These are often in venues where the lighting is unspectacular at best. I am ashamed to admit that perhaps as many as 90 percent of my exposures under these circumstances are failures of one sort or other. Most of the time, it's because the lighting sucks. Some of the time, it's because whatever I'm focusing on moves rather suddenly. Sometimes, other factors interfere: it is sometimes hard to shoot good pictures when you are also trying to dance. It is likewise hard to shoot good pictures when the lead guitarist has decided to crowdsurf right on top of you! The fact that I ripped through 1,200 exposures is probably also a function of the fact that I've never used a motordrive before, and, as they say, if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.... I did try to take a whole load of Pentax Lens Gallery-style pictures with the DA18-55mm that came with the DS, but I didn't have a tripod, and I felt cold enough that my shivers were probably adversely affecting the pictures. That probably accounts for a lot of photos right there. > More important after the excitement of the new camera wears off is the > picture quality, which you've not mentioned at all. �Do you like the > results you're getting compared to the other cameras you tried? �Have you > shot high quality JPEG and did you like the results? I have liked the results at high quality JPEG, generally, yes. RGB noise at ISO 3200 is horrid, however. It's especially bad if you underexpose. At ISO 800 and below, it's quite a different story, and I have been quite impressed at the quality. A whole bunch of my recent stuff with the DS is on my livejournal: <http://www.livejournal.com/users/ouij/> Check it out and see for yourself. The images could probably use a touch more sharpening, but I do this myself in the GIMP, rather than mess with the camera. Other than that, I'm quite pleased. Things I haven't done yet: set it on a sturdy tripod and shot lens test targets (but I'm never going to do that), or taken long night exposures (no cable release). > Your comment about one-handed use of controls is interesting. �I use the MX > and other small cameras, and simple, easy access to controls is important > to me. �But I seem to recall the istD was OK in that regard as well. The D is also good in that regard. I didn't mean to imply in my post that it wasn't. In general, I've found the Pentax digital bodies to have the most intuitive control placement. Nikon's D70 would be next, for me, very closely followed by Canon's EOS 10D. > > What's a Drebel? Digital Rebel, aka EOS 300D. The real competition for me was not between the *ist D and the *ist DS, but rather between the *istDS and the EOS 300D, the latter of which is ubiquitous around here. -Luigi
