I had been having some mixed feelings about my Tokina 80-200/2.8. It seemed like I just couldn't get sharp photos with it. Last night, some friends were playing at the Trout Farm up in Zayante, and I decided to get a little more practice with it. Since I did manage to get a few shots, that actually were sharp, even wide open, I realized that the lack of sharpness isn't entirely the lenses fault. Big surprise, that I'm the limiting factor in the sharpness of my photos.
After reading the article on sharpness in TOP, I think that a lot of my perception of lack of sharpness is actually lack of contrast. I think that other things also come into play, such as the difficulty of manually focusing on moving subjects in low light. Even with a split prism focusing screen. For that matter, even with live view it is difficult when the subjects move faster than the latency of the image. If I actually had money to buy glass, I'd be very tempted to look for the autofocus version of this lens, not only would it make focusing easier in many cases, but the shake reduction would work a lot better too. While f/2.8 is as fast as a zoom lens gets, I certainly notice it being a lot slower than my primes. There were several times last night, on TAv mode where the ISO went all the way up to 25,600. Things also might have been a bit sharper if I hadn't left my ball head at home and could have used my monopod. The other thing that I've been playing with is my post processing trick of dialing up clarity all of the way, up to the point that it nearly looks like over done HDR, but with a lot more noise. Interestingly, I think that when I use this trick the photos work best when they are actually just a bit soft to start with. I'm guessing that this is because the clarity slider does something not entirely unlike sharpening, so if I under sharpen first, then they don't look quite so oversharpened afterwards. For them that care, I put the 24 best up on flickr, here they are with the fluidr front end so you can see the exposure data: http://www.fluidr.com/photos/ellarsee/sets/72157631375658366/ Interestingly, 20120901-LRC70488.jpg was something like five stops underexposed. I'm not sure how. I normally shot the drummer at something like 1/40 f/2.8 ISO 10000, and it was shot at 1/125 f/5 ISO 125. It's a bit rough, but still a testament to capabilities of the K-5 that I was able to get it that good. -- Larry Colen l...@red4est.com sent from i4est -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
