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.


 

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