On 8 Feb 2002 at 6:10, Gaurav Aggarwal wrote: > Hi all, > > I bought a used PZ-1 in the US a few years ago but hardly used it. > Subsequently, I moved to India and have been using it off and on, more > as a "tourist" photographer only. >
<snip> > > Lately, I observed that my pictures aren't any good compared to what > fellow tourists take primarily with their P&S or sometimes with Canon > EOS Rebel (2 of my friends have this one). Neither the focus is as > great (clarity misses out), Blurry pics are due to mis-focusing and camera shake. Are you sure you're focusing properly, and have set a reasonable shutter speed? > nor is the color, brightness and contrast. Given a good exposure, this has more to do with the film and processing used than anything else. Underexposure can screw with these properties too. Are your negs well-exposed? > Somehow, something is always missing in my pictures. > If they were in focus and well-exposed would you like them? > I had read quite a few books on photography while in the US 3 > years ago and had felt that I knew what I was doing when I put the > camera in Aperture priority mode, and click at f8 or f16. Obviously, I > am wrong somewhere. This should work ok if you've got enough light and you don't have the spot meter accidentally selected. > > Then lately, I started using the 50mm/f1.7 manual focus thinking that > the prime might be much better. The results are hardly any good > compared to 28-200. I mostly shoot Kodak or Fuji films of speed 100 or > 200. I have changed my developer couple of times and did see some > difference but nothing major :-( You need quite a bit of light to shoot at f/16 and ISO 100. Are you using a tripod? > > Also, I have been able to make use of DoF and regret this. Try as hard > as I might, I can hardly figure that something is indeed going out of > focus at small apertures (i.e., wider openings). Are you saying you don't understand this, or you can't see it in the finder? > > Any tips, criticism, suggestions would be more than welcome. Thanks!! > I am relatively new to PUG and so pardom me if I have violated the > charter/norms of the mailing list. Welcome aboard, you're remarkably on-topic. All I can suggest is to make sure the camera is set at a decent shutter speed if hand-holding (1/focal length), that the spot-meter isn't on (set it to matrix), and that exposure compensation is set to 0. It might be helpful if you could scan and post some of these photos you're talking about. Good luck. tv - This message is from the Pentax-Discuss Mail List. To unsubscribe, go to http://www.pdml.net and follow the directions. Don't forget to visit the Pentax Users' Gallery at http://pug.komkon.org .
