I would still like to see more DOF on those shots. What aperture setting did you use?
----------------- J.C.O'Connell hifis...@gate.net ----------------- -----Original Message----- From: pdml-boun...@pdml.net [mailto:pdml-boun...@pdml.net] On Behalf Of Mark C Sent: Saturday, September 01, 2012 7:27 PM To: Pentax-Discuss Mail List Subject: GESO - First Macro Shots with Pentax Q (And First Q impressions) My Pentax Q arrived on Wednesday, a full day sooner than expected. I had planned to leave first thing that morning for a business trip, but was delayed by a few hours and luckily was able to scoop up the camera and lenses and take the kit with me as I headed out. I had a chance to test drive it a bit and read the manual while I was away. When I got home late last night the K to Q adapter was waiting for me. Earlier today I went out looking for subjects to try with the Q and D-FA 100mm macro lens. I was thinking about the striking spider shots in the post that Darren shared a while back. and by chance my garden provided two large spiders to serve as photographic subjects. So - here are my first macro shots with the Pentax Q: http://www.markcassino.com/b2evolution/blog6.php/2012/09/01/two-spiders The light today is quite flat as the remnants of Isaac roll through the area, and this afternoon we had a pretty good rain, so no other chances to take the system out. A few comments on the Q: - It is small and fun and the image quality is quite good. I'm very impressed at how well it performs. Noise is much less of an issue than I expected. The small sensor means low magnification of subject and therefore lots of DOF, but for macro work that is a boon. I would not use this as a portrait camera though. - The Zoom lens is a joy to work with. Nicely dampened action, quality built. I wish Pentax would build K mount lenses that are this solid. - Pentax has done a great job of building a standard interface across cameras. I picked up the Q and was shooting. Everything made sense. The only thing I needed to look up in the manual was how to activate the MF assist on the toy lenses. - The Q with the kit lens or one of the small lenses is pretty much pocketable. With the zoom, not so much so... Regarding the lenses that I have (first impressions here) - Stock 8mm f1.8 lens: Nice and sharp but barrel distortion is off putting. Yes, I can enable distortion correction but I wish they had produced a lens with less distortion. Has decent close focusing ability. 5 to 15mm Zoom - a joy to work with and very good results. Great all round zoom. Fisheye - I have a hard time focusing this even with MF assist enabled. Looking at my shots, I always had my finger on the lens's focus ring (and visible in the shot). Its a super cool ultra wide but takes some getting used to (at least by me). Its a reminder that ultra wides can be as difficult to work with as ultra telephotos. Toy Telephoto - I only took a handful e of shots with this. I did not see any Holga-like distortions but none of the shots I took were very sharp. I assume that was operator error - I had not figured out how to use the MF assist on toy lenses yet when I tried it. I need to give this a more thorough testing. I'll probably grab the "wide" toy lens and have a full set of lenses - it would be nice if Pentax came out with some more Q lenses, but I'd be surprised if they did. Overall - this is a really cool and fun system, great IQ with the attributes that you would expect from a small sensor re DOF . Do any Q users have a recommendation re a good bag to carry a full Q Kit in? This used bundle that I bought came with a case logic bag that holds everything, but everything is jumbling around in the bag. The smallest 35mm SLR bag I have is about 2x too big and has partitions for lenses that are many times the size of the Q lenses. Mark -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions. -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
