a few brief thoughts
· Wednesday January 28, 2009
I know I promised a posting about the new printer (which is awesome, btw), but there are a few brief thoughts about the K20D that have been rattling around in my brain that I wanted to get down.
Colour
This camera loves it. The colours it produces are so rich and beautiful, it’s like falling in love with colour photography all over again. I first assumed the lush reds and blues from the Zion pics were just due to the subject matter, but the K20D has been producing lovely images back in Blighty, as well:
Immaculate conception
The above photo shows a church that’s just around the corner from where I live.
Part of the technical success of these images may also be due to the 35mm Macro Ltd. that’s been seeing a lot of active duty. As mentioned before, Mike Johnston at theonlinephotographer calls this lens an Optical Paragon. I’ve also been trying my Pentax-A 50mm f/1.7 manual-focus lens (because it’s the only other Pentax lens I own currently).
Manual focus
... is really difficult. The depth of field wide open with the 50/1.7 is tiny, and I’m still finding it quite difficult to shoot accurately with this lens (even when the middle red light blinks to say the image is in focus).
Over the weekend, I went on a night-hike through the New Forest with the walking club. It was a nice walk; not too cold, a bit muddy, but nice company. The last time I did a night hike with this group a couple years ago, I was able to get a decent shot with my Canon 50/1.8:
map faff
I had a couple similar opportunities this time around, but my focusing was just not as fast as my 350D’s autofocus (even with a bit of focus-hunting in low light). Not to mention exposure problems.
Exposure metering
Admittedly, this is one area that I knew would take some getting used to. It took a while to adapt to my 350D’s metering-brain; most shots were set to -2/3 stop exposure compensation with matrix metering.
The K20D’s matrix mode seems to things right most of the time, hence setting 0 stop exposure compensation as standard. Though sometimes, when I think it needs compensation (like an extra-bright scene), it just doesn’t and I end up blowing highlights. I think this is just something I need to get used to… either that, or break out of my go-with-what-(kinda-)works mold and learn how to use a more ‘predictable’ mode like spot metering…
In-body shake reduction
I still don’t think this is as effective as Canon’s in-lens image stabilisation. I’ve been shooting quite reliably with it on at 1/30s with the 35mm lens, so that’s close to a stop of gained usability vs. no shake reduction. But anything slower can be a bit more hit-or-miss.
Pixel-peeping at slower shutter speeds reveals slight blur (vs. much worse blur w/o SR), though the images are still usable at web resolution or for smaller prints. Maybe I’m just not used to the fact that I now have 15 megapixels to play with?
my faithful Inspiron 9300
Processing images now is much ssslllllooooooowwweeeerrrr than it used to be. I put this down to the fact that the K20D’s RAW files are twice as large as those produced by the 350D. The solution? Buy a new computer!!! — I wish.
I’m upgrading my laptop’s RAM from the current 1gb to its maximum 2gb, and hopefully it will be as if I had bought a new computer, haha ;-)
—
Happy (Chinese) New Year to all, or as some have been saying, Happy ‘Niu’ Year!! This is the Year of the Ox according to the Chinese zodiac, and the Mandarin word for ox (or cow, depending on the context) is ‘niu’, hence the wordplay above. Finally, a mentor of mine has offered yet another permutation— Happy ‘Gnu’ Year =)
— Emery Ku
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