Vertical grip ?
Am I understanding correctly that only the following 3 cameras have genuine vertical grips ? By that I mean a vertical grip with a shutter release button. MZ-S *ist *ist D The other cameras in the MZ/ZX series do not have a vertical grip but only a battery holder, right ? Thanks Bo-Ming Tong
Re: Getting into studio strobes; what to do with my 120J ?
http://www.alienbees.com/ 400WS is enough for most stuff. tv Thanks Tom. I think I should be ignoring their "effective ws" rating right ? So far a B800 seems closest at 320ws real. Also, I saw something I haven't seen on their web site called a "brolly box" which is a shoot-thru umbrella with reflectors at the back to block light spill. Has anyone compared this to a softbox ? If the difference is minimal I will go for a brolly box because of both weight and price. -- Bo-Ming Tong
Re: Getting into studio strobes; what to do with my 120J ?
William Robb wrote: Generally, hair lights are snooted down so they don't shine directly into the lens, which can cause flare. I like to put a grid in behind the snoot. I find the added texture it puts into the hair to be nice. I think you are correct about 400ws being enough for a mono light for general purposes based on my own experience. You can do a lot with one mono light for a main, and a reflector for fill, and you never have to worry about your fill ratio being to strong. A camera type flash mounted above the subject with a cardboard flag to keep light off the camera lens works fine as a hair light. Dear William, Thank you for your great advice. I thought of using a camera-type flash as hair light, too, in order to reduce my initial investment, because these can be zoomed to 105mm and get a pretty good guide number. Do I put this directly above the head, with some DIY barn doors to limit the dispersion of the light ? (I saw real studios putting a strip dome over the head as hair light.) I also saw a Lumiquest snoot on eBay for camera-type flashes at a very reasonable price but I am not sure if it is useful for hair, or how I would place it and point it. Also, most of our models are posed and they move around. I think the greatest difficulty therefore is to aim this hair light quickly. I think the "rules" say the hair light should not spill onto the face or to the background. Am I getting it correctly ? Thanks again. Bo-Ming Tong
bounce flash + image stabilization = ?
I am tempted to buy a used Canon 28-135 IS and borrow a Canon but before I do so I wish to hear your opinions whether this is a stupid idea. I have been doing bounce flash indoors a lot using a shoe-mounted flash. I started out with f/5.6 at 1/30 on ISO 800 film rated at 400 or 500, and got nicely illuminated pictures. Ambient light is only 1 or 2 stops below flash light. However, there was once I get blurred images. I wasn't sure whether it was my handshake or people moving, but it is not possible to handhold a 45mm lens at 1/30 and expect sharp results. So I switched to 1/60 last time. There was also not enough depth of field sometimes so I used f/8. My flash can still output that much power. My images came back not very satisfactorily. While the near objects are still nicely illuminated, the far objects are completely dark. I used to get at least some detail off the far objects. As you can see, I am torn between a handholdable shutter speed, depth of field, and ambient lighting. Would an IS lens take the first one out, so that I can use an even slower shutter speed such as 1/15 and capture ambient light while keeping the aperture small for depth of field ? Obviously this can only help my hand shake but not people moving. Or, should I "just do it" and use 1/15 since the far objects are out of focus and the near objects are mostly illuminated by flash at a speed of around 1/500 ? This might result in a sharp image with a blurry trail, though, if the flash light does not greatly outshine the ambient light, which seems to defeat the original purpose of capturing ambient light using a slow shutter speed. Any comments ? I don't want to go Canon because of IS... I didn't realize there is any use for IS/VR until now.
Viewfinder magnification 0.8x vs. 0.7x, why ?
Dear all, I think my old trusty Z-1p would stand up well against any camera from Nikon/Canon except the top and second top models, except for AF, and I would expect the finder to be larger, brighter and more clear in particular. Comparing it to a friend's Canon Elan 7E, my friend made the comment that the Elan 7E's finder looks larger. How come ? The Canon is spec'ed at 0.7x and the Pentax, 0.8x. So we could expect the Pentax's finder to be more than 10% larger. To my eyes the sizes look pretty much the same with no differences. Also, comparing the Canon 28-105 and the Pentax 28-105 in the finder, the Canon had a wider field of view. According to a test of popular photography, it should be the other way around since Canon cheated much more on the wide end of the lens (around 30mm) than Pentax, although I haven't test-shot these two particular samples side by side to know for sure. The Canon has 92% coverage horizontally and the Pentax also 92%. I don't get these at all. Why ? Quite depressed that the pinnacle of the Z series not to defeat the Elan which is pretty low on Canon's food chain in these areas. In terms of features they are pretty much equal and the Canon even have eye-controlled focus. Well the Pentax has illuminated LCD though... In terms of brightness, the lenses have a 1/2 stop difference, and the Pentax finder looks darker, but I can't tell it is 1/2 stops darker, more than 1/2 stops, or less than 1/2 stops. Bo-Ming Tong
Re: More serious competition for *ist-D - Kiss Digital/300D
...and I say, just as authoritatively as you, that the 300D will be a marketing *flop*. Consumers with a thousand bucks for a camera are much smarter than Canon realizes. The will invariably spend the extra few hundred for the 10D rather than be seen as kiddie-Rebel-photographer-wannabees. Or, as Mike suggests, they will go for a nicely specified digicam for the same or less money. -- John Mustarde www.photolin.com With all due respect, I beg to differ. The "homework" that a typical beginner does was to walk into a drugstore, an electronic store, or whatever (but not a camera store), and see the low end models of Canon (Rebel), Minolta and Pentax. They ended up buying a Rebel Ti in most cases because that's the latest model, it is the most expensive in the store, and on paper there are more features than the others, though they have no idea whether they need those features. The salesperson then rounded out the sale with some overpriced filter and cleaning kit... I don't think the DSLR buying process is any different from the film SLR one. $1,000 is not really that much money, they could have spent it on a digicam anyway. The difference between a Digital Rebel and a 10D is so subtle, that many 10D owners are lamenting on digital camera discussion boards already over their purchases, and their tactic was to tone down the Digital Rebel as a cheap, inferior camera. No there is nothing wrong with it at all. I have handled a relatively recent Rebel, it is not what you think, nothing like the original Rebel or EOS 1000. I personally would not use it, but I have to admit it is a pretty strong photographic tool. I'd expect the price gap of 10D and 300D to narrow, until they match the price gap between a Elan 7E and a Rebel Ti. And I'd further expect *ist D to track the 10D price closely.
Manual focus TTL flash
Which manual focus Pentax bodies support TTL flash ? So far I have only found LX and Super A/Super Program. Did I miss any other ?
Re: Zooms vs. primes (WAS: Re: Let's talk about the FA 28-105/4-5.6 PZ(now abit long))
frank theriault wrote:
Well, there has to be some trade-off, doesn't there?
Even if we take Pal's original statement as true ("today's best zooms are every
bit as good as primes"), a zoom is going to exact some penalty on it's user.
They're bigger, heavier, slower, more complicated, take more time to use (since
you have one more control to fiddle with), and more expensive than a prime.
I'm not saying zooms are bad - I have a couple that I use quite often - I'm just
saying that optical performance is only one thing to consider in a lens (albeit,
a pretty damned important thing! ).
ciao,
frank
That's very true indeed, but we started out discussing sharpness only.
In fact, I found a lot of zooms which perform well stopped down at
infinity. Many of these are weak at close range and/or wide open,
though. If a manufacturer wants to look good on a lens test report, they
just optimize for infinity performance. That way, they will get a high
MTF score at photodo and get outstanding SQF from Pop Photo. (They have
a sentence or two stating close range performance but in their wording
everything is always good.) I use zooms indoor with bounce flash, so I
really need good close range performance and wide open performance.
Really, I wish the A35-105/3.5, maybe a modern version which is as sharp
as primes like Paal said, is available in AF. Tamron makes a 35-105/2.8
but the AF version is only available for N/M/C, and its reviews from
real users seem a lot more mixed than the good magazine reviews it got.
I don't care about their 28-105/2.8 as size is a very important
consideration. Their new 28-75/2.8 is small but I like the reach of 105
more. Furthermore I would rather wait and see more real users' comments
before I decide I will buy it.
But, replacing a Pentax lens with a third party lens ? That makes me
feel sad.
Maybe I should change a bit of my thinking. I am not looking for a film
lens which works also on digital, but rather a digital lens which also
works on film. A 1.5x multiplier on a 28-75 is just right for me in that
regard. For film I will stick with my Contax G2 with prime lenses for a
long while. It is the Pentax *ist D which I plan to get down the road.
Bo-Ming Tong
