Saturday was a perfect spring day here in Coastal Oregon. Sunny and crisp. I took my dog for a long walk; it felt good to get outside again and look around.
When I first got to the ranch 8 years ago, I brought with me a Pentax ME Super camera, which I’ve had since about 1980. I’ve taken tens of thousands of shots with it: product shots beyond number for websites and promo materials and documentation for various businesses and I’ve been in over the years, family portraits, etc. Basically a lot of film went through that camera over 20 years. But that camera is now held together with duct tape (literally!). I own half a dozen lenses (macro for taking closeup product shots, telephoto, wide angle) and various filters (UV, etc.) for that Pentax ME Super, worth way more than the camera itself was when I bought them back in the 80’s.
So about 5 years ago I began shooting with an Olympus Camedia 3040 Zoom digital camera. We got it just before a trip to Europe, where we used it to take hundreds of shots. While it has many good features, I have never liked certain things about that Olympus 3040 camera. Here’s the short list. It has a definite lag of several seconds between the time you push the button and the time it takes a shot. The only functional viewfinder and focus indicator is the back LCD screen, which has terrible resolution, and which is basically invisible in bright outdoor light. You can never tell whether something is in focus by looking at that screen. It’s definitely not up to taking the quality of photos that I could take using the Pentax.
So then I heard that Pentax had made a new 10 megapixel camera, the K10D. I bought a nice kit recently that had the K10D, a new camera bag and a good lens. The great thing is that this camera will accept all the old lenses (macro, telephoto, etc.) from the old Pentax camera. It has some limitations (you have to use them in manual mode) but I’m pretty well used to that from the ME Super.
Here are some examples of the first set of photos I took from my walk on Saturday. These come as huge original photos, over 3000 pixels wide and 2000 high. That 10 megapixel size really makes for huge files, but they are crystal clear. These images here have been reduced for the web, but they give an idea of the good color range of this camera as well. These photos were hand-held (no tripod) using only the automatic focusing and light/aperture adjustments.
Fir Tree Silhouette
Spar Silhouette
Spring View
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