Thursday, February 20, 2014

Pentax Q Fisheye

Got a used fisheye for the Q. Set it for what I assumed to be infinity and shot away. Awful. Toy lens, indeed. Then consulted my learned friend, the internet to discover that the lens near <--> far settings were pretty much at the end of their respective ranges not at the end of the range settings, but rather about half-way there (plus a scoach). The feeble marking on the lens above denotes about infinity (on this example of the lens). Yes, you can use manual focus peaking and enlarge the image but on an f5.6 tiny lens it shouldn't be necessary IF you can set it at infinity (for outdoor wide shots). Close and indoors, no. Anyway, I set it to auto hdr [my favorite setting on this camera] and shot some more photos and was a lot more pleased. Here are some examples (some merged, some not) that were corrected in Photoshop to remove the fisheye distortion (I just used a preset lens correction filter for a Pentax 8mm fisheye, which worked). I also tweaked them a bit with PS's hdr ability. So what? Well, here's what. If you want to shoot really, really wide and get a good result and you want it small and cheap, this is the way to go. Check Amazon's used pricing for the camera, the original Q, which is a step up from the 2nd camera, the Q10 and you'll see camera bodies for around a 100 beans or so. The fisheye is another 100 beans or so. That's an amazing bargain to shoot this wide AND be able to carry it around casually. This is a very small camera.


 

Tuesday, February 18, 2014

Fuji X-F1 / Lake Fayetteville bike path pictures

Weather finally improved and I felt obligated to get out and about. The Lake Fayetteville bike path was 100% completed last fall. I had ridden the path in various stages of completeness over the years and looked forward to having the final portion paved. Nothing wrong with single track but this is around a lake through various mud pits. The finished path is the bomb. These were shot from the path with a Fuji X-F1. I actually reached for an old Canon G7 to bring but the battery was 90% gone, so the Fuji made the trip.

The exposure bracket separated the biker into three ghosts.

Botanical Gardens of the Ozarks is on the trail.



Frisbee Golf Course

Sunday, February 9, 2014

Fuji X-F1 / winter walk with Moochie

Two shots, side by side, merged in Photoshop and tweaked in Topaz. Happy winter, everybody.