Member Mark Gowin

I agree. This is a great little lens for a bargain (relatively speaking). I really enjoyed this lens when I had a M system.

The Dell M4600 you spec'd out sounds awesome. However, I would probably consider a 13″ Macbook Air (very small) for on the road image review and new loaded desktop with large display for image processing and editing. I see value in your thinking to get a fast laptop with 100% RGB display so you can process images while on the road and, frankly, I…[Read more]

Thank you for taking the time to do this test. I am very impressed with the lens performance without the profile, but your test goes to show how much improved the LightRoom processing has become since the S2 came out.

I was out shooting today and came across an instance where I needed to focus bracket shots to get the depth of field I wanted. That is when it occurred to me that a great firmware improvement would be have an auto focus bracketing feature. The way I envision it working is that you set-up the camera and autofocus on the main point of interest. Then…[Read more]

I would like to know what she is looking at so intently.

Doug;504 wrote: How about LensAlign? Nicely made product just for this purpose…
http://www.whibalhost.com/lensalign/

I have seriously considered getting the Lens Align. It looks like a well designed product and should be easy to use.

Thank you for the replies. I suspected that my test was flawed and should be reperformed. I will try again with a flat target. Also, I have an idea for constructing a 3D target which would be shot head-on that I might try as well.

For what it is worth, the test subject target above was my second attempt at a focus test. The first test was…[Read more]

Jack, thank you for the explanation and thanks for posting the 1/25 sec shot. I agree with you, the 1/60 sec shot is much better. Frankly, I probably wouldn't have even tried the 1/60 sec shot hand held. It is good to have my eyes opened to other possibilities.

Hi Jack, did you do any noise reduction on your photo? The noise doesn't look to bad. Also, I am very impressed with your hand holding capability with the 120m at 1/60 sec.

For some reason the color doesn't look right on the above photos – at least they are not similar to what they look like in LR3. The colors are more muted and the red is more orangish above versus in LR3. I verified that I exported to sRGB so that isn't the problem.

I figured out part of the problem with the photo of Jack Daniels. Instead of shooting at +0.5 EV I shot at -0.5 EV.

Here is another photo taken the same day along with two crops (bright and shadow). This photo is much better regarding noise. Interesting trivia – Chattanooga, TN is home to the very first Coca Cola bottling company.

S2 and…[Read more]

Hmmm! Something doesn't look right with the crop above – it isn't as sharp as it appeared in LR. I guess it doesn't matter much since the point of the post was to show the ISO performance. Note there is definitely more visible noise in the shadows.

Here is another ISO 1250 photo and associated crop. This time the photo includes shadows where noise is most visible. As with the previous photo, this one is process as normal, but I did not do any noise reduction. Here the noise is a bit more evident in the shadow of the cave.

The photo is of a statue of Jack Daniels in front of THE cave…[Read more]

Thank you for the compliment David. I am working on a blog post about my time with the Pentax 400mm. It has been an interesting experience. Stay tuned.

Thank you for the compliments on the photo. It's not the sort of subject one thinks of when shooting a 400mm, but I had walked out in a field a few hundred yards in hopes of capturing a photo of a doe and her very young fawn. I lost track of the doe and fawn and missed the photo I set out for. On the walk back to the car, I liked how the grass was…[Read more]

One might ask themselves, why use ISO 1250 in good lighting condition such as those in the photo I posted above. The answer is shutter speed, but to be honest I would have never considered using ISO 1250 just to gain a little bit of shutter speed until Josh posted his article.

In the photo above, I was using a 400mm lens, but I was also…[Read more]

Ok Josh, I am now a believer that ISO 1250 can be used with excellent results – at least in certain conditions. The photo below and the associate crop was taken at ISO 1250 with 1/2 stop over exposure. I processed the image as normal but I did not do any noise reduction. I am shocked at just how good ISO 1250 is in good light.

Oh by the way,…[Read more]

Very impressive Kurt (especially handheld). I like the composition as well.

Thank you for the article Josh. I appreciate the effort and the sample images look very good. However, they were all taken in fat light where the only reason to increase ISO is to get even higher shutter speeds. I am anxious to see how well method this works in poor light where you are increasing ISO just to get near hand holdable shutter speeds.…[Read more]

Just remembered another feature I would like to see.

– Fix the auto bracketing feature to work like the M9 where it will fire off all shots in the sequence at the first press of the shutter. As it is now, the shutter button must be pressed for eacha ND every shot in the auto bracketing sequence.

– Also, allow auto bracketing be biased…[Read more]