k200d, autumn

Back in business, and on a more sensible budget! No more shooting an hour after dark with no tripod like the k-r, but when I can shoot I know the results will be excellent. A cool but fine day allowed me to bike home from work among the colors - here is a great example, trimmed and tweaked from jpeg.

An 18-55WR is coming soon, so weather beware: I'll be coming out rain or shine!

(note the later post on L.a.b. processing; I prefer that shot to the one here)

turnovers part II

If you go back to my March post you'll see how I sold my K-7 and 18-135 to improve the household budget. I settled in with a k200d and was satisfied.. for a while. The budget crunch eased a bit, a like-new k-x became available - and off I went again. The k-x became a k-r, and several lenses came swiftly. Some were bargains, others simply irresistible - but the result was too many lenses, especially considering that family health issues kept us from traveling to photogenic places. I took some great shots of the yard and my bike commutes to work.. but any camera could do such things justice.

Those medical bills have tightened our belts again, so here I am in a familiar spot - out with the new, in with another k200d! Other than a WR 18-55 (maybe next paycheck?) I have most focal lengths covered, and a few elder primes remain from the sell-off. To some degree I'm settling for old gear - but the k200d is an impressive camera, and while not a low-light champ the 10Mpixel sensor will meet my needs (like it did when its twin sat in my A200). It's also weather resistant, which is almost always a good thing here in the Pacific NW.

Looking back on my previous images with the k200d (like the one above), I see good images and memories of less stressful times. I'm looking forward to tacking many more images under the k200d banner!

the great purge of early fall 2011

Can I really hold to it this time? Will I actually reduce both the lens count and the focal-length redundancy that sits on shelves around me? Let's find out!

In the past week several lenses have departed, a few more are being considered, and a few leftovers will head for the donation bin. In some cases I have purchased 'replacements' - similar lenses found at bargain prices, but not a true purge in the technical sense.. :^)

When this is over the number of prime lenses will drop to 2 or 3, and zooms to 3 or maybe 4: not exactly sure yet which will win out. That's a sad commentary since I've owned a couple of them before and sold them, so how can I not know which I prefer?? Well, that too is technical - meaning I don't understand it either. Some days it's vital they all take 52mm filters, other days I'm compelled to go with the most versatile, or most compact, or ... like I said, I cannot explain what isn't clear to me, so enough. It does feel good to feed the credit-card bill though, that needed to happen.

Update - a week later and the shelves are nearly bare. Two zooms and three primes remain (but that count includes just one of three 50mm choices - still hoping for a sale or two to clean that mess up!).

going, going..

Another week later and the count is now one AF zoom (DA50-200, surprise!), the Rikenon 70-150 f/4 and three primes: 28/2.8, 50/1.4 and 135/3.5. That's it (note counting two tired zooms headed for the donation box). Also just the G1 body, as the k-r has been returned to its VISA origins. I will bid very low for a while and hope to return to Pentax, but for now this needs to be it. Surprises me to be here, but it will do for now.

how not to relax, part LXVIII

How about a 3½-day hike to help me relax? Sounds great.. until life intervenes. First it's the weather: none of my WA Cascades hikes will be available with 1-2" of rain in the forecast. Plan B minus is a long drive to the Wallowas, an excellent place to relax and clearly the best weather. So..

Day 0 - long drive, camp just after sunset in NE Oregon. Already dark, fire danger extreme and I just have a tarp, so a rough night in the car - oh, and 12 hours of darkness, welcome to autumn!

Day 1 of hike - start hiking at 9:30, arrive just before 5PM at Douglas Lake. Trails are poorly marked and my map skills are not great - and I've already blown out a blister on my left heel. Dinner was not to my liking, so about half of it came back to the trailhead. And strangely enough the camp was fogged in most of the night, at 7400 feet!

Day 2 - given the sore foot I'm thinking a loop over Glacier Pass is a bad idea, so I'm revising the plan. Today will end after a 45-minute walk to the infamous Mirror Lake, and I will retrace my route to exit. Instead I caught myself 1/3 of the way to Glacier Pass anyway, after taking a nonexistent trail around the Left side of Moccasin. I returned to Moccasin and found neither Glacier Pass nor Mirror Lake junctions - and a new blister has formed on the right heel. I sit down at the shore, soak my ruined heels in the lake and patch the blistered areas. Now I am getting upset: I've found a half-dozen "trails" that lead to illegal horse camps but no clear hiking trails to well-known destinations?!? The trail to Mirror Lake was never found, so I limped toward lower Horseshoe Lake to cut my losses (I'm a solo hiker and had seen no other people, so conservative play is the rule). By the time I reach there I'm so angry at the situation that I no longer want to stay an extra minute in this 'horse wilderness'. At 5:45 I'm back at the car, exhausted and limping. Camp is once again in the car, at Wallowa Lake park.

Day 3 - instead of 1½ more days of hiking, I'm driving back to Anacortes where my wife awaits. That is my fourth straight day of working myself to physical and/or mental exhaustion - somehow contrary to the "relaxation" plan.

So in summary - I have a few photos that may have turned out well, thanks to the K-r, 18-55 and 55-300 - but very few memories that I wish to share or relive. The drive was far too long, even for a 3½-day hike: four day hikes with a warm bed in Anacortes would have served me far better. Other than the excellent Z55 backpack and the nice weather, little comes to mind as positives. At least I was allowed to vegetate in Anacortes with few responsibilities, so I did an extra day of nothing - that's relaxing!

As to my errors, they are quite surprising to me. It has been a very long time since I had to find moleskin in my pack, and it was a great relief to find that the first-aid kit contained some (now nearly all gone). I have had so few foot issues in the wild I cannot recall the last time with certainty - it may have been 1998 in the Wind Rivers. As to my map and routefinding issues, they too are a shock as I have done several x-c navigations in my time. My feet required a trail this time. Taking the non-mapped route to the left of Moccasin Lake can only be seen as a confusion/repetition of seeing the route go to the left of the previous (Douglas) Lake. In any case failing to find the mapped path just below Moccasin that leads to Mirror plus no path to the right of Moccasin is a real head scratcher. In either case my maps were poor: the USFS Wilderness map is too small a scale to be useful here, and my Topo! printout plots a trail right through Douglas Lake which I chose to disregard. After Horseshoe Lake I found Zero trail markers, and given the number of horse paths I feel that this lack is not reasonable. Had I only gone via the main and not Alt path through the Basin this would not have happened - but my maps failed to show the 50-foot drop between the Basin trail and Douglas Lake, which is why I retreated to the Alt trail and a campsite. Waay too many 'if only's on this trip - so I'm done with it.

oh no: lens tests again!

 

So, I did it again. I trimmed my kit down, only to let it grow again. I fell for the Costco Principle: look how much I saved by.. er.. buying stuff! ? !! Slow learner, that's me -- assuming I'm learning at all.

I picked up a kit lens the best possible way: from the Ugly bin at KEH.com. I have yet to hear anyone complain after doing this; I am sure that some are quietly returned and no more is said, but what one tends to hear on forum sites is flat-out praise.

Now I'm one of them: in my case, Ugly meant no hood or front cap, but otherwise a great lens in excellent Ugly condition.

Then I began to lose it - first to a student down on his/her luck, then to a person leaving Pentax. So I should get a gold star for promting education (if not a tax break), and putting an ex-Pentax user out of their misery was nice of me too. But suddenly here I am with an 18-55 II kit lens, a DA16-45 and a 17-70 Sigma. I've liked the 17-70 since my Alpha days, and had one for the Pentax (why did I get rid of it, I wonder..). And I love the focal length of the 16-45.. well OK just the 16 part, that 45 part is why I've sold this one Twice before! And the kit? I hear Allan Iverson in an interview room somewhere, saying "we're talking 'bout KIT LENS, man. Really? KIT LENS?". But they're good, and often very good.

So - more tests. I hate lens tests, for two reasons: they are often of things I seldom shoot, and I screw them up. I screwed this test up too, by forcing all lenses to use the same aperture And shutter speed - great to see exposure differences, sure, but a lousy way to let a lens show what it is capable of doing. Oopz - er oops. So I shot all lenses around 50mm (threw in a 55-300 and two Rikenon primes too), then closeups, then as wide as they go. And I looked them over for a good 10 minutes before picking a winner. OK more like 45 minutes.. but it felt like a week. I hate lens tests.

And the winner? Well of course, everyone's a winner - pass out the medals and take a bow! Well, to my profound embarrassment I give the overall prize to the Ugly 18-55. Not excellent at anything much, but the others had certain areas where they failed worse than the kit. I so wanted a 'better' lens to take on my backpacking trip.. but hey, I'm taking a 240g lens that shoots .35x closeups and takes 52mm filters! Those are mighty good points, so I'm satisfied. And I'll be even more satisfied when I recoup 80% of my expenses selling the other lenses.

Now go get some sleep, and when you awake you won't remember this article, and those lenses I put up for sale will sound perfect as your kit-lens replacement.

"we're talking KIT lenses, man!"

change is the only constant

The bank balances dictated a constriction to my imaging deals, with more emphasis on 'outgoing' -- so out went the DA35 and DA16-45 (with great reluctance). In six months I expect to reacquire the zoom, it fits my style very well. I toyed with letting the k-x go, and the 18-200 Sigma, then finally put both together and off they went. The money from that deal went truly sideways though, as a local offer on a k-r was truly too good to pass - so the bank balance dropped but not by as much as planned. A few more deals may trim the 'fat' from my lens collection and make this sting a little less.

So how did the k-r catch my eye? Well, the k-x felt like my ideal camera, and I felt certain that I could wait at least another generation before moving it. However, the k-r catches all of my "but.." issues re. the k-x and with a very small size/weight penalty. The sensor is equivalent if not equal, and that means amazing. Had the k-r been priced $30 higher I'd have looked the other way (albeit with discomfort) - but there it was, and here it is. If the budget breaks further I will more likely let the micro-43 gear go instead, as I have a good amount of Pentax gear at prices that just cannot be duplicated until another generation of cameras is in people's hands. Several $50 primes, a couple of zoom bargains and the k-r in absolutely pristine condition - yes, once again I can say "this will serve me well for years" and believe that I mean it. :^)

welcome back my friends..

I admit it - despite two failed attempts to really like the Pentax 55-300 zoom, I was hunting again. I owned both DA and DAL versions at one point with my K-7. The DAL went a-swapping for a weather-sealed 50-200, and the DA left during the budget crisis that ultimately cost me the K-7 as well. Now I've retrenched with the k-x and find that the better high-ISO performance allows this long zoom to have a better chance to yield blur-free images.
I didn't need this lens badly, so I let a few deals slip away, primarily on the DAL (optically identical but with a few less bonus features). But at last I stumbled into an offer I dared not refuse - so a 'like new' DAL is on its way, and the Sigma 100-300 will move on to cheer up someone else. The 100-300 is a better lens than I had expected, but pulling back to 55mm is a great feature - and f/5.8 beats 6.7 for those hi-zoom lo-light images I persistently try to capture. At least I now have iso5000 available in a pinch!

I find it ironic that my two original favorite lenses are back in the stable. The DA16-45 really caught my eye when I migrated from Alpha gear, and teaming it with the 55-300 and a 50 prime seemed perfect. The K-7 led me in other directions (mostly weather-sealed ones) but the k-x has turned me around. Thankfully the wheeling and dealing was a draw financially, so I'm happy to be back with this pair.

another Rikenon joins the kit

When I saw this at auction, I drew a blank. I knew nothing about the lens, so I did some research. A 70-150 should do well given its short zoom range, the XR line is well thought of, and it's reasonably small at 450g and using 52mm filters. OK then: why not submit a few bucks over the minimum and watch? Well, that was enough.


And its performance is disappointing - in that it makes me wonder why I own so many other lenses!

This is one talented and fun lens. It's also a bit of a pioneer with its separate zoom and focus rings despite being made in the 1-touch era, and more impressive it has an internal zoom mechanism - only focusing causes this lens to change size. It has a sorta-macro mode, less than 1:5 closeup but still handy. I've had a difficult time wrestling it off my k-x, it's that much fun and the images are that good.

Here's the image folder in Picasa: enjoy! I know I enjoyed making them.