Hi, Christine.
I looked at the pictures. First of all, please congratulate your
daughter, if I understand correctly, she won the first place. Wonderful
achievement as it surely would boost her self-confidence in the future
in every area, not just gymnastics.
Now to the photography part. I think you did well with K-7. Since you
did not provide full size files, only 1024 pixels on the long edge, it
is hard to see how printable they are, but I think that A4's can be
printed quite easily.
With my k-7& 50-135, the results were reasonable, for what they are,
shot at 3200iso, f2.8, 1/125 sec. (I put some snaps up here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/23028...@n04/sets/72157625788531640/with/5341649434/)
But, I could do with less noise. And even higher iso (or wider
apertures) could get me faster shutter speed, which would also improve
matters.
So, I'm trying to decide where to focus my longing...
1) a k-5? (for all the obvious reasons)
2) faster lens? (most shots are within the 50-85mm range)
3) noise reduction software? (I only have what's available in
ACR/cs4... open to suggestions, thoughts on this)
What do you think?
1. K-5 will probably help you. I cannot say for sure, but the common
opinion has it that it improves greatly over K-7 in many aspects of IQ -
dynamic range, noise, color fidelity. But it is expensive.
2. I don't think that there are too many faster lenses to suggest to
you. In fact, f/2.8 is where all zooms max out their aperture. At least
those in Pentax K mount. I don't believe that DA 70/2.4 limited will
offer serious gain in speed. The next candidate is FA 77/1.8 limited and
the final one is FA* 85/1.4. FA 77 costs less than USD 1000, while FA*
85 costs more than this figure. I've FA 77 and it is mighty fine lens.
There is a gotcha with FA 77. It has rather long focus throw and
therefore it does not focus all too fast. I cannot say about gymnastics
as I never shot such a thing, but it may prove problematic. In principle
you could resolve this by switching your camera to rapid fire mode (or
even slow fire mode - 3fps) and simply shooting in bursts.
3. I've LR 3.3 and before that I bought Topaz DeNoise for USD 80. Prior
to that I did not believe in NR software and now I do. You can download
fully operational 30 day trial from their web site and this is what I
did. It does very convincing job.
FWIW, I've considered asking her to switch sports. But it wouldn't
help much -- she also plays hockey... :)
I thought hockey and gymnastics had rather opposite requirements on
one's body...
Boris
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