Its snowing like mad outside now - a good foot of the stuff on the railing outside the window. Hard to believe that it was almost 70F just 10 days ago...
Anyhow - this was my first shot at snow crystal macros for the season. I decided to give the K10D a whirl. The results (which are not too good) are here: http://markcassino.com/galleries/stream/stream04.htm And commentary is here: http://markcassino.com/b2evolution/index.php?title=first_snow_crystals_of_2006_07&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1 Tonight was a dud mostly because the snow was not right, but the K10D tossed a few surprises my way. A few thoughts about the K10D and this kind of work - 1. P-TTL does not seem to work when using a bellows and reverse mounted lens. I noticed before with the *ist-D and Mz-S that they cameras were working out of just plain TTL. Tonights I just used manual flash, but this may be a show-stopper for using the K10D for this application. The *ist-D may have a life-long appointment! 2. Nothing at all happened when I tired switching on anti-shake, but I just realized that is because it seems to be disabled when the 2 second mirror pre-fire is active. 3. I focus these shots using a couple of fluorescent bulbs, peering through almost a foot of extension (bellows and tubes) and through a f 2.8 lens, reverse mounted. The finder on the K10 was quite good compared to other cameras I've don this with. 4. Shooting at about 20 F (-7 C) the battery showed now signs of slowing down. 5. Without better subjects, I don't know if the 10.2 megs will make a difference. If you figure up how much area one pixel, in even a 6 mega pixel camera, covers when shooting 5x lifesized or greater, it seems like each pixel is covering such a small area there's not much to be gained by increasing resolution. But who knows... 6. The exposures are very clean in terms of lack of noise, banding, etc. In the past the slight gradient in the backgrounds has introduced real headaches with banding in slide scans. But both the *ist-D and K10D do well with that. If anyone wants to see better snow crystal shots, the older and more tightly edited ones are here: http://www.markcassino.com/galleries/snowflakes/flake_thumbs.htm - MCC - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Mark Cassino Photography Kalamazoo www.markcassino.com - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net
