Howdy folks, I joined the list this afternoon, after meeting John Francis at a photo-meetup lunch I instigated. Some of you may know me as "ellarsee" on the dpreview pentax forum. Ellarsee is just a funny way of spelling LRC, my initials (and part of my destiny to be an Electrical Engineer, but I digress, often).
My involvement with photography seems to be a very common profile. In 1973, when I was 12, Dad got a Spotmatic II and taught me some of the basics. I'd frequently play with the camera, setting up shots, exposure etc. but rarely actually taking any shots. Someplace, there's a print of my first photograph, but I haven't seen it in a while. The following summer, I took photography in summer school and learned the basics of darkroom work. My first camera was an Argus C3, which I still have. That September I got a used Minolta SRT-101. Sometime around then, Dad and I set up a darkroom which I spent a lot of time in over the next several years, until my folks got divorced and Mom rented out the downstairs apartment. I had intermittent darkroom access in college, but after I lost access to a darkroom, photography became something I did, but not seriously. Lest this post rival a Norse saga in length, I'll skip forward to November 2007 when I bought my K100D super. I almost got a Nikon D40 but when I found out about the Pentax, came to the conclusion that even if Pentax didn't have any offerings at the top end, what they did offer gave a lot more for the money than Nikon. I'm afraid that I've never shot a Canon SLR that "felt good in my hands". The plan was that the K100 and kitlens should be enough to last me a couple years until the performance that I wanted was "affordable". My favorite lens on 35 had been the Vivitar 28-105 and the kit lens was not too far from the equivalent range. One of my key reasons for getting a DSLR rather than replacing my stolen FZ50 was low light performance. The following weekend, I determined that the kit lens just simply was not fast enough. Cutting to the chase, the next week I spent more than I had on my camera and kit lens on an FA 31 limited. The past year has been a pretty typical one of spending stupid amounts of money on toys. A few very nice lenses, and quite a few inexpensive used ones. My latest gear acquisition is a katzeye focusing screen which to someone who grew up with manual focus, is like growning an arm back. When I'm not exhibiting fiscal irresponsibility, I'm working on the theory that the best way to learn from your mistakes is to make sure that you make a lot of them. So, I've been shooting a lot of photos, basically whenever I can find a few minutes to play with my camera, and 40,000 frames later probably have almost a dozen that I don't need to ashamed of. I've been posting pictures on my flickr account: http://flickr.com/ellarsee Since I do a lot of blues dancing ( http://fridaynightblues.com ) and nobody else has much luck shooting dancers in the ridiculously low light environment, I've been working on that, experimenting with both IR flash with my K100 and an FZ20 I had converted to IR. I tend to keep my 18-250 on the camera as my "Ready for anything lens", but when I can I prefer to shoot with a prime. I'm currently toying with getting a DA40 to see how close to a "carry in a coat pocket" sized camera I can get. I've also toyed with the idea of the 43 or the 21, but while the 40 is just over my threshold of financial pain, the other two are quite a bit over. I was wondering if anyone in the San Jose/Santa Cruz/Bay Area had any of those lenses and would be interested in getting together so I could try them out before spending money on one. Another Pentax related question is that I have a friend who lives in Sacramento who is very interested in the K2000, but who would much rather try one out before buying it. Does anyone know of any stores in her area where she could check one out? Larry -- It's not the steps in the dance, it's the dance in the steps. Larry Colen [email protected] http://www.red4est.com/lrc -- 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.
