Congratulations Larry, you survived 10 years of the slings and arrows of
owning and using the equipment from the third entry in a three horse
race, to mix a metaphor. Pentax has been the underdog for as long as I
can remember, even back when they actually sold more actual product than
Nikon or Canon.
Just remember, any idiot can shoot with Nikon or Canon equipment, it
takes a special kind of idiot to shoot with Pentax.
On 11/28/2017 2:00 PM, Larry Colen wrote:
Today marks ten years since I brought my K100Dsuper home from San Jose
Camera. A few months previously I had upgraded my Lumix FZ20 to an
FZ50, which was in many ways a brilliant piece of kit. The zoom and
focus rings on the barrel acted just like they would on a "real
camera", the UI was overall wonderful to use, the lens was awesome,
and in good light the image quality was great. However, in lower
light, the small size of the sensor showed its weaknesses, so when the
FZ50 was lost when my girlfriend's car was stolen (we got the car back
but not the stuff in it), I decided to look at low end DSLRs.
My theory was that I'd just buy an inexpensive camera, maybe not even
buy much in the way of lenses for it, because I figured that in a few
years camera bodies with the performance I wanted would become
affordable.
My first forays to Best Buy and the ilk made it obvious that I really
disliked the low end Canon. The kit lens was so bad that feel of
zooming and focusing practically made my lens crawl. Someone with a
website, who seemed to know what he was talking about (I won't mention
who but his last name rhymes with Rockwell) waxed eloquent about the
Nikon D40.
I wandered into San Jose Camera, planning on buying a D40, and the
salesman was talking about the advantages of Canon over Nikon. I was
mulling this over because I really did not like the Canon when I
overheard him discussing the Pentax with another customer. It turns
out that using my legacy Nikon glass on the D40 was not trivial, the
Pentax had the same sensor as the D40, built in image stabilization, a
nicer kit lens, and cost less.
Long story shortened, I brought the K100 home, went from shooting
maybe a couple hundred frames a month to wandering about with the
camera any time I had a few minutes to kill and averaging about 100 a
day. That weekend I realized that the kit lens on the K100 simply
didn't work for low light dance photography and I ordered an FA31 the
following week.
I suppose I could put together a collection that is a serious ten year
retrospective, but I'm feeling lazy, so here's a set that goes almost
that far back:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/ellarsee/sets/72157682830861601/
And for more of the earlier, here's a book I put together just about
seven years ago of my first three years since I got back into photography
http://www.blurb.com/b/1790067-three-years
I had spent some time hanging out in other fora, mostly the DP Pentax
forum before I met John Francis and he pointed me at the PDML, so
y'all can blame him. The PDML struck me as one of the few places where
people who actually knew how to use their cameras outnumbered those
that didn't. In most of the other fora, folks who had been using a
DSLR for about six months and had recently learned how to use fast
glass and misuse the word bokeh were the experts that gave everyone
else advice.
I found that looking at other people's photos, and particularly
reading the critiques of them helped my own photography tremendously.
Also when taking a photo that wasn't in a style I normally shot
thinking about how someone in particular from PDML who did a lot of
that sort of photography was a great place for me to start when
figuring out how to take it.
In some ways it's kind of a silly anniversary to mark, but I do want
to credit and thank y'all for the help in whatever artistic (if not
social) growth I've managed to achieve in the past decade.
--
America wasn't founded so that we could all be better.
America was founded so we could all be anything we damn well please.
- P.J. O'Rourke
--
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.
