Photography

[pxpaulx]

Anyone else on this board into photography? I've grown increasingly interested over the past year and a half. I enjoyed it when i was young (like really young, under 10 probably - although you could probably better describe it as a fascination with taking pictures, I obviously didn't understand much about photography at age 10).

When I jumped into the dSLR realm, I did so on a budget, although that quickly grew. I got in on the Pentax system, with a *ist DL (I just learnt that the * in *ist was to be 'filled in by you' i.e. enthusiast - well, that doesn't work, hmm, journalIST, whateverIST, etceteraIST). Anyways, I sold that in January and bought the new K10D, which I enjoy using very much.

I've also gone through alot, alot of lenses (which is where being on a budget works with Pentax - you can use any lens they've ever made). Currently, I have their 16-45mm F4 constant lens, an older 50mm f1.7 Pentax lens, and an older 70-210mm F4 constant Pentax zoom (one of the sharpest zooms supposedly ever - and I believe it), and a 1.4x tamron teleconverter.

Pentax has some new lenses that are coming up that I'm drooling over too, but pushing a Grand for a new lens is alittle too much for me I'm afraid. I just bought the 16-45mm after we went to Colorado for vacation. The kit lens 18-55mm wasn't fast enough, and I had a faster Sigma 28-105mm f2.8-4 that was fast enough, but not wide enough. So, I sold them both (like I said, been through at least a dozen lenses in the last year) and bought the pricier but definitely worth it 16-45mm, with a slightly wider (I love wide angle!) and constant fast f4 lens.

I really enjoy landscape photography, and my wife occasionally steals my camera with the 50mm f1.7 for plant photography, which she is quite good at (probably better than I am at most!). Other than that, mostly fast paced action shots of our dog Griffin.

So, what do you shoot with, and what do you shoot?!

[creinhart]

I got a Cannon XTi last year. Really enjoy it. Went with the cannon because I had a couple of lenses.

Enjoy taking pics of the family and places I go...

[wabbaloo]

The Wabb has recently gotten into photography, especially night sky photography. We're luck that we don't get too much of the bright lights from the city. However, our equipment may not be the right kind. :eek: We have two Olympus digital cameras. I can manipulate the settings on both, but I don't know exactly what I need to be doing yet. :mad: I've got the user's manuals of course, and am researching the particulars of night sky photos. Have joined a local online photography club, so I'm well on the way. Need to get a tripod as well. :(

Easiest pics for me to take - sunsets/sunrises, flowers, wild life
hardest pics for me to take - night sky moon, stars, planets, etc

Herr Wabbaloo

[pxpaulx]

Funny you should mention night sky photography. I've gotten quite abit of info from this website:

http://www.astropix.com/HTML/I_ASTROP/TOC_AP.HTM

It is definitely tough! Are you using a tripod then, and placing the camera right over the eyepiece, or doing wide angle stuff with the camera itself? That's what I've attempted previously. Moon shots actually require pretty fast shutter speeds, and can be tough! The funny thing is, we have a telescope we got about 5 years ago (its a 90mm schmidt-cassegrain made by Orion) - it has mostly collected dust since then.

This week, I decided to order a thread mount for my dslr to attach to the telescope directly. So, the telescope is F11 and 1250mm. to give some perspective, at 1/2 a mile away with my dslr attached, the camera frames about a 4'x6' area! The image quality is far from spectacular, I presume that the 10.2 megapixels of the camera are more than the lens (telescope optics) is able to resolve - basically it doesn't focus very well. but for a $8 thread ring it was worth a try.

Though there isn't anything too recent (and no CRV pics yet) I have a flickr account, www.flickr.com/photos/pxpaulx if anyone wants to take a look!

[pxpaulx]

I got a Cannon XTi last year. Really enjoy it. Went with the cannon because I had a couple of lenses.

Enjoy taking pics of the family and places I go...

What lenses do you have/do you use most frequently? I love that Pentax allows use of literally ANY K-mount and even screw mount lens ever made. I know Canon and Nikon have backwards compatibility as well, but it only goes back to certain lens series. Like I said (or didn't) I've gone through at least a dozen lenses before getting to my current 4 lens lineup, and am finally quite satisfied with what I have. In the future I may want one of the new Pentax lenses they are coming out with, but I'm happy with my range of focal lengths for the moment. I do want Pentax's 10-17mm fisheye lens (if you've heard of www.pbase.com look that lens up, amazing pictures with it!), but thats another $300 that I can't spend at the moment!

[Mikeybc]

I was also heavy into photography before the digital boom took place...almost went broke getting film developed, I used Minolta Xi body with a Tamron 24-70 and a Minolta 100-300, I didnt really miss the 70-100 gap I'd like to find a digital SLR...too bad Minolta only made one (6 megapixel) that i know of before Konica-Minolta got out of the camera game, I really dont want to have to buy new lenses, I do have a Kodak 6490 but it only is 4 megapixels and doesn't shoot RAW images, its also not compatiple with Photoshop.

It would be nice to see some pics posted here. I mainly shot outdoor/nature and tried some nighttime stuff too, try centering the north star in the viewfinder and leave the shutter open for a half hour or more.

[creinhart]

What lenses do you have/do you use most frequently? I love that Pentax allows use of literally ANY K-mount and even screw mount lens ever made. I know Canon and Nikon have backwards compatibility as well, but it only goes back to certain lens series. Like I said (or didn't) I've gone through at least a dozen lenses before getting to my current 4 lens lineup, and am finally quite satisfied with what I have. In the future I may want one of the new Pentax lenses they are coming out with, but I'm happy with my range of focal lengths for the moment. I do want Pentax's 10-17mm fisheye lens (if you've heard of www.pbase.com look that lens up, amazing pictures with it!), but thats another $300 that I can't spend at the moment!

Yeah, the Canon XTi only uses Canon EF mount lenses but I already had 2 (a macro and a zoom). The zoom is a 70 - 210 mm / 1:4.5-5.6 and the macro is a 50mm 1:25. I also have the standard 35 - 80mm 1:45 - 5.6 that came with the camera.

[pxpaulx]

I was also heavy into photography before the digital boom took place...almost went broke getting film developed, I used Minolta Xi body with a Tamron 24-70 and a Minolta 100-300, I didnt really miss the 70-100 gap I'd like to find a digital SLR...too bad Minolta only made one (6 megapixel) that i know of before Konica-Minolta got out of the camera game, I really dont want to have to buy new lenses, I do have a Kodak 6490 but it only is 4 megapixels and doesn't shoot RAW images, its also not compatiple with Photoshop.

It would be nice to see some pics posted here. I mainly shot outdoor/nature and tried some nighttime stuff too, try centering the north star in the viewfinder and leave the shutter open for a half hour or more.

You should check out a site like www.dpreview.com and ask in their forums if the lenses you have would work on the Sony Alpha line. They kept backwards compatibility with the Minolta lens mount, I'm not sure how far back the compatibility would go. That 24-70 would have been my favorite range on a film camera! With dslrs, there is a crop of usually 1.5x due to the smaller aps-c sensor size, so it would be a 36-100 (or so) lens now. You could also check out ebay, or www.keh.com for good used Minolta dslrs. From what I've read they had a pretty good feature set when they were being made.

On another note, I did the dumbest thing last night! the new Pentax dslrs can accept any k-mount lens. well, any except the ricoh k/r mount lenses. Only i got this old lens and it didn't say ricoh on it, and i compared it with my current lenses and didnt see any difference. Well, it was a ricoh lens. those lenses have a tiny depressable pin on them - that pin happens to get stuck in the AF motor hole on the mount when you try and mount the lens, and that means the lens was stuck. i have a stuck lens worth $20 on my $1K camera. crap. crap crap crap crap crap. luckily on www.dpreview.com there is a thread for dumbasses such as myself called 'the canonical stuck lens thread'. getting it off wasn't pretty, it involved lots of twisting, and a razor blade. you have to stick the blade between the lens and mount, and wiggle until it gets the pin up. tried it for an hour or more last night, didn't work. ok, the thread said be patient and keep trying. finally it came off this morning, with just a few tiny scrapes to show for the battle. OMG did that freak me out, last thing i wanted to do was send it to Pentax to get it off! so, no more trying crappy lenses on my camera going forward. ever.

[Mikeybc]

You should check out a site like www.dpreview.com and ask in their forums if the lenses you have would work on the Sony Alpha line. They kept backwards compatibility with the Minolta lens mount, I'm not sure how far back the compatibility would go. That 24-70 would have been my favorite range on a film camera! With dslrs, there is a crop of usually 1.5x due to the smaller aps-c sensor size, so it would be a 36-100 (or so) lens now. You could also check out ebay, or www.keh.com for good used Minolta dslrs. From what I've read they had a pretty good feature set when they were being made.

On another note, I did the dumbest thing last night! the new Pentax dslrs can accept any k-mount lens. well, any except the ricoh k/r mount lenses. Only i got this old lens and it didn't say ricoh on it, and i compared it with my current lenses and didnt see any difference. Well, it was a ricoh lens. those lenses have a tiny depressable pin on them - that pin happens to get stuck in the AF motor hole on the mount when you try and mount the lens, and that means the lens was stuck. i have a stuck lens worth $20 on my $1K camera. crap. crap crap crap crap crap. luckily on www.dpreview.com there is a thread for dumbasses such as myself called 'the canonical stuck lens thread'. getting it off wasn't pretty, it involved lots of twisting, and a razor blade. you have to stick the blade between the lens and mount, and wiggle until it gets the pin up. tried it for an hour or more last night, didn't work. ok, the thread said be patient and keep trying. finally it came off this morning, with just a few tiny scrapes to show for the battle. OMG did that freak me out, last thing i wanted to do was send it to Pentax to get it off! so, no more trying crappy lenses on my camera going forward. ever.

Thanks for the info, I now remember my brother mentioning something about some Sony cameras accepting Minolta lenses (mine are the popular AF lenses that mount on the Xi and Si cameras) I'll do some research on the Sony's and used Minolta's might turn up cheap, i just looked at the Minolta 7D specs and they are quite good aside from the 6.1 Megapixels but that should be enough since the rest of it seems to be of very high quality

If I had that little lense mishap you had I'm sure I would have lost sleep over it...or stayed up all night until it was off...glad it worked out for you.

[pxpaulx]

I got home with the lens and the AF motor still works fine, that was concern #2 after getting the lens off, since the little pin stuck in the AF motor hole on the mount. So, except for alittle external blemish all is fine!

From a few brief descriptions it sounds like the sony alphe accepts A mount lenses from the minolta line (tamron, sigma included as well). The 5d and 7d did sound like nice cameras as well when they were available, never looked them up on ebay myself, i know that KEH (linked in my last post) usually has a couple of them. they are a very reputable dealer from what i've experienced and read, and usually their ratings of used equipment is under what you would expect (a rarity for most retailers) for what its worth!

[2RedV's]

I was into photography way back when. My first camera was a Pentax K1000 and I still have it with a bunch of lenses. Have not used it in 15+ years. Sad, isn't it? I too, can recall the amount of cash outlayed on developing!

[Mikeybc]

Ohhhh, I just checked out the Sony A-100 DSLR , you can tell Sony kept much of the Minolta's design which I like (I was unaware that Sony Bought Konica/Minolta's camera arm after they quit making cameras) better yet its cheaper than the used Minolta D7's I saw on Ebay. This one is going on my wish list! :) I wonder if my remote shutter release will work with it...anyway dpreview is a great site for comparing cameras.

Those old Pentaxes were great cameras, I remember paying about 15 bucks for a 24 exp. roll at our local camera shop, but they cared about and tried to compensate for any exposure mistakes I might have made. Now I can do it myself with Photoshop and a good printer.

[pxpaulx]

2redv's - any standout lenses in the bunch you're willing to part with?! Do you know you can use them all with pentax's current lineup of dslrs? (unless they are made by ricoh - the k/r mount has to be modified or else you'll have what happened to me in yesterday's post!) I have 3 lenses, only 1 of which is a newer auto focus lens (a 16-45mm DA lens, 24-70 equivalent film focal length); my other two are a pentax smc-a 50mm f1.7 and a pentax smc-a 70-210mm f4 constant. Oh, if you're never gonna pick that camera up again, pentax lenses are hot on ebay. that 50mm f1.7 will fetch you $70-80 depending on the condition, to give you an idea.

the only lens i really still want is the pentax da 10-17mm fisheye. if you've ever heard of www.pbase.com before (a photo storage site, they let you search by cameras and also lenses to see results), check it out. it is an amazing little lens, maybe santa will be good to me this year. eventually i will try to replace the 70-210mm f4 with a digital auto lens (pentax has some nice ones coming up that will start to compete with canon and nikon's fast sports oriented lenses), but since i dont do sports much, it can wait awhile.

Mikeybc - watch out, first you'll be wanting the camera, but lens buying addiction never ends! (see my first sentence from the first paragraph!) Sony has a couple of more pro models coming down the pipe, but the A100 has a pretty solid feature set, about as close as the entry level dslrs come to my k10d - minus a few 'never done before' features and weather sealed body.