trying again

About a year and a half ago, I wrote this about the Pentax DA18-135WR lens, which was supposed to be my best answer to the kit-lens replacement conundrum.  I had tried replacing the kit with several different lenses (DA16-45 and Sigmas 17-70 18-200 and 18-50 f/2.8-4.5) but this one had the best feature set of them all.

The DA18-135 was pretty new at the time, and I got mine via a swap.. which meant that I had no receipt on which to rely if the lens had issues.  It did: I could not bear to look at the results beyond about 70mm.  I let it go to another owner instead of making Pentax aware of it, and let my frustration be known; nearly every reply told me that lens was a bad copy that should have been sent off for inspection.  A couple of reviews online were not favorable, with flaws similar to what I found - but most reports are that it beats the 18-55 in its range plus does well at longer FLs as well.  I have felt bad ever since about not getting it repaired, since it was too new to be beyond any sort of warranty.  Too late.

Even with my bad experience, the features remain tantalizing.  If you need WR you are best served by not switching lenses, even from one WR to another.  And the silent focusing of the DC motor pairs well with the K-7 and K-5 with their soft shutter sound.  So once again, the 18-135 sounds like an ideal lens!

So I'm trying again, having won a bid on a copy removed from someone's new K30 kit.  (Guess the seller has the coveted 16-50 and 50-135 DA*, or something else to make this surplus to his/her needs.)  I sure hope this one meets my standards, but if not I will send it in to be inspected regardless of any proof of purchase.  I would love to wander with this lens and either the DA55-300 or the SMC-M 200/4 for longer work, and my two Sigmas (15mm fisheye and 50mm macro) available off the bench.

Update - this is undoubtedly a better copy of the 18-135.  Sharpness is decent, but more important is the lesser degree of color fringing at telephoto focal lengths.  Yes I can make it look bad if I try and if I look hard, but that's nothing compared to the old copy.  This of course shakes up the kit again - off with the 18-55WR and whatever else can bring in spare funds.

camping at last

 After nearly three years without any practice, my first trailer-camp required backing up between two thick trees and up a 20-degree slope.. and oh yes it was pitch dark, not counting the many nice relatives who illuminated our site and called out warnings or encouragement as I struggled to regain old habits. 

We hung out in the bug-free woods for three days.  I brought two cameras to play with: the K-5 and a fine red Lumix GF2.  While its primary purpose is its AF video more than raw-image stills, it wandered the camps with me nearly as often as the K-5.  In fact the K-5 sulked a bit - not exactly that, but it showed signs of a K-5 battery trait that is fairly well documented.  The mirror mechanism fired twice for several shots when using a freshly-charged battery, and as the battery is used the issue 'always' resolves - and my camera ran true to form.  The GF2 had just its 14-42 kit (28-84 equivalent) while the K-5 used 15 (fisheye), 28 and 50mm (macro) lenses (22, 42 and 75mm equivalent).  All had their uses, and for the family photo I went old-school with the 28mm Rikenon.  This old manual lens is a sharp one, and I captured the bunch of us very well.  Sadly my wife was ill through all of Saturday, so the trip had rather strong ups and downs.  But despite the health problems we did it!

equal time for equal lunacy

This time it's the USPS delivery service hopscotching from Washington to central California to deliver a package to Portland. How is this a sensible thing to do??

macro lenses are nice.. but!

This image is in fact from my Rikenon 28mm lens near its min focus of 11 inches and shot at f/5.6.

Yes it's heavily cropped - but I cannot find any great fault with that as I'm not about to print a poster of this.  Remember when you hear complaints about how 50mm and 35mm macro lenses make you frighten away bugs: cropping can be a good friend.  I went inside and grabbed my Sigma 50 macro, but really could not get much closer in any case.  I could crop it a bit less to get slightly better results, but the great shot with the 28mm is a better story to share. Macro-like images from a $35 lens and no screw-on 'macro filter' works for me!

camera kit: more fine tuning

As I noted in a recent post, the lens set that I have is quite excellent and satisfactory. I still place low bids now and then, and to my surprise I won a 100-300 Quantaray. It is a clone of an earlier Sigma that I had, and it rivals the Pentax DA55-300 but with lower contrast and f/6.7 above 220mm; it's full-frame friendly and has an aperture ring, so it has uses with film bodies and great potential if Pentax takes the hint and releases a FF 36x24-sensor camera. Until such moments arise it really has no great use to me, but it is a bit more compact and focuses faster than the 55-300. I guess lower bids are in order though! One can make a nice pairing of the 28-105 and 100-300, but neither of those lenses are kept in immediate reach very often - I guess "top-shelf" optics means that I put them further out of reach, so it's not the compliment that the label suggests. Another addition is on its way, and again it's an old favorite: the SMC-M 200mm f/4. Since the 70-150 was my highest focal length in manual-focus gear, this was a nice (re)addition; I can now use 28, 70-150 and 200 manual-focus lenses to make a nice primal set. To round it out, AF primes at 15 and 50mm and the SMC-M 135/3.5 (also on the top shelf) can be added.

kidding, right?

After waiting and watching for several days, my last-ever cell phone (probably) reached Troutdale, about 10 miles from my house.  I came home from work expecting to see it on the porch - instead it had traveled 150 miles to a processing facility.




I swear you can't make stuff like this up.  If it went by road it may have passed within 1/4 mile of my home on its way out of state.  And my protest note received a simple form letter, stating that all is on schedule.  Nobody at fedex can actually look at a map and see how stupid and wasteful this process has become?  Corporate knows best.  Idiots.

getting one's perspective

I had always wanted to see a backpacking map and my home town set to the same scale.

Like this:


It's amazing what a bit of elevation, topography and solitude (not to mention the pack weight!) can do to make distance scales change.  The Sierra sample is the neighborhood that we backpacked in 2009, so I can envision a few of our camps and remember the effort.  The rewards for that effort were spectacular.  I've walked home from downtown before, and it's charming in its own way to see the homes and yards - and the (paved) routes too numerous to count.  Similar yet incomparable.

And now I know.

processing inside the K-5

A few weeks back the sun broke out, creating a nice spotlight effect on downtown Portland. I took this picture despite being forced to shoot through the office window, which was originally tinted but now also has a film coating as well; this effective destroys color balance and sharpness and makes most images curious throwaways. At least I managed not to get reflections of the interior lights, which look like UFOs in many other shots!

 

I decided to process the shot within the K-5, to see just what I could come up with.

Step 1 was cropping to 16x9, to remove the lower clutter that wasn't sharp enough to provide any value. I then shifted the color a bit and tried the lowest-setting HDR effect. I think I left the 'retro' filter on too, but I tried & discarded several filters before finally saving the image.

The result is dark portions that are too dark, but it's a far better image than the original. 
The damage from that awful window-glass is almost gone!

   

So the K-5 is not a complete darkroom by any means, but it's not bad at all.