….with my new K-7. I had an awesome shoot today and was sooooooo impressed with how intuitive the controls are! I felt right at home within half an hour or so!
Thus far, these are my observations (some may seem trivial, but I am a girl afterall!) 1. First thing, right out of the box is that I LOVE the new grip on it. It is deeper and allows me to tuck my fingers in next to the lens, making it feel like I have a much more secure hold. 2. Oooooooooh, how GORGEOUS is the screen?!?! 3. I love that it is small and light like the *ist D as I have really small hands and weak wrists and I still feel confident that I can hand hold at slow speeds with this camera (even without shake reduction). 4. I love the continuous shooting !! Woot! Woot! No more filling the buffer after 3 shots for me! I’m in heaven here! 5. I reaaaally like the fact that there is a really easy to use button to allow the shifting between drive modes, and likewise with the ISO button too. 6. I notice that they still include the green button – a feature that I think is useless and one that I have NEVER used. 7. I think that they are going a bit overboard with the 9 exposure modes! I rarely use anything other than manual, or bulb, and think that on a camera of this calibre the green mode and program modes shouldn’t even be included. IMO, anyone purchasing a camera with these specs would never give these modes a second thought. I think that the program and green modes should be left on the lesser spec’d models like the K-x. In saying this, I can sort of see the merit in the Tav mode, and might have a play around with it from time to time, as an alternative to manual. The reason being that I will sometimes get carried away and forget to check my meter and then find that the light source has changed slightly and I’ve underexposed or blown out a shot. It would be nice occasionally to be able to shoot “freely” without thinking about metering and still have full control of both the shutter and aperture. 8. I know its superficial, but I luuuuuurve the sound when the shutter is released – it makes me think of the same sound a Nikon makes! Lol. 9. I love that the exposure mode dial now has a kind of “locking” function on it, as I always used to accidentally knock it somehow and go to shoot only to realise that it had been switched to Bulb, which was a PIA! Bad stuff: 1. I know that it is probably redundant anyways, but it sucks that you can’t shoot in HDR mode in RAW. 2. Noise- my brief today was to shoot an interior (a baby’s nursery for a magazine) using only available light. I also had to shoot a moving subject (8month old baby), using said available light. Well, today we had torrential rain all day and at noon, inside, it had about as much light as we would normally have at 6pm at night. So, I upped my ISO to shoot at 400, and was really surprised at how much noise this resulted in. Probably a combination of two factors; slow shutter speeds (between 1/5 and 0.3” sometimes) and the 400 ISO, but even so, I think it is a bit excessive. Oh, and I never really saw any benefit in the inclusion of a Live View mode until today either! I was trying to get a wide shot of the nursery, and the widest lens that I have is 18mm, and due to the slow shutter speeds, I had to use a tripod. But, I discovered that I needed to get down as low as possible to get the composition that I needed, and even with me lying on the floor, and resting my elbows, it wasn’t low enough and I couldn’t hold the camera still enough at 0.3” to get the shot I wanted. So, I unscrewed the centre column of my tripod and mounted my camera upside down on it, and almost immediately thought to myself “how the hell am I going to compose this and focus it properly?”. Then, I thought of the Live Mode. Switched it over and then though to myself “oooh, good one idiot, now you have to look at it upside down on the screen”. Well, low and behold, the camera switched the view around the right way! I was so excited I almost did cartwheels! HOW COOL IS THIS THING?!?!? Like seriously, Knarf, if you are reading this, from one broke photographer to another, you NEED to save up and get yourself one of these beauties, you will be AMAZED!! Lol. You know something that I have just figured out about myself and the way I shoot (yeah, I know, call me slow that it took me this long to realise it!)? In going over the manual of the K-7 and in my initial shoot with it today, I have realised that I am really a “no frills” kinda girl, and in reality, THIS would be my dream camera: Same body, controls, size, screen and general layout and aesthetics as the K-7. BUT, the only exposure modes being M, B, video, and maybe Tav. RAW only for image quality/file format, who the heck can do anything with a one * jpeg anyways?!? Same specs in max shutter speed, motor drive, buffer etc. Live View and video. Shake reduction. And obviously as a result of it ONLY being RAW, there would be no white balance controls. And THAT’s it!! For me, all the other stuff is basically redundant. See, I don’t EVER use exposure bracketing, EV compensation, any white balance adjustments, or for that matter do I EVER use any of the multiple AF points. I ALWAYS leave my camera on the centre AF mode, and then use the focus lock function to shoot with. It is such a habit of mine now that unless I am using manual focus, it is the only way that I focus. I simply shoot in RAW and do ALL of these adjustments in Photoshop, post shoot. This brings me to ask, do any of you guys do the same? Are there merits for doing these things in camera, rather than afterwards? For example with the EV compensation, I prefer to just make sure I have the best exposure that I can and then selectively underexpose/overexpose or burn in what I need in the RAW converter, or if it needs more work, in Photoshop itself afterwards. I prefer to do this afterwards rather than in camera so that I can have more options to play with. Anyways, I know that the way that I do things is probably really backwards, and probably really girly, but I do like to keep it simple so that I can focus on the expressions of my models/subjects, composition, styling and colours etc of what I am shooting rather than fiddling with controls the entire time, if that makes sense? One other thing that I am confused about is the RAW+ mode. I had my camera set on it today, not really knowing what it was, and when I have come home to upload the shots, it all uploads fine, but when I try to view the PEF files, they won’t work? The jpgs are perfect, but neither Lightroom nor Bridge can view the PEFs, does anyone know why this is? I wonder would this be the same if I chose just RAW mode, or are the PEF and JPG files somehow linked together? (I have no idea what I am talking about here, so forgive me if I sound naïve to it!). Ok, so I’m going to get these shots edited and online, it sucks though that basically I can only work with jpgs as I can’t seem to access the PEFs. I’ll be putting a gallery of them up for my client though, and will share it with you guys too, afterall, it is my maiden K-7 shoot! I literally took it out of the box this morning and went to the clients house! I had set my alarm to wake me up a few hours early so that I could “have a play” with it, and our power went out and reset the clocks, so I was woken by my son at 8am, saying “mum, you’ve gotta go, you’ll be late!”. (sometimes I do love having a precocious 11 year old!). Phew, ok, I’ll leave you lot to digest this monster post! Tan. ☺ -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
