On Coding, Photography and Life
Horoscope: Leo
Age: 27 years
Profession: Software engineer
Hobbies: Photography, reading, lifting weights
Nimettömänä pysyttelevä blogin lukija lähestyi minua hiljattain varoittaakseen Suomen toimistoihin kätkeytyvästi, potentiaalisesti homekoulujen ja sairaaloiden veroisesta uhkasta kansanterveydelle.
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A thread called The XR Rikenon 50mm f2 sharpest 35mm lens claim got me very intrigued about this lens. At a glance it seemed to me to be comparable to a Pentax-M 50mm f1.7 in that it is said to possess a good sharpness wide open and goes for very cheap on ebay. When one came up on a Finnish photography forum for 30€, I knew I had to buy it to see if there was anything to the talk. Only when the lens arrived, I noticed it was the Ricoh XR Rikenon 50mm f/2 S.
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I went for a short walk with the Vivitar 28mm/f2.8 I bought recently. Right next to us there’s a railway that is nowadays used for cargo only. The old Laukaa railway station is no further than 300m from us, and there’s a section of old railway no longer in use with an abandoned railway car on it. I got some shots of the rails and car and of autumn foliage. The colors in the pictures are subdued, as the sun was behind a cloud curtain, but I like the mood. I had a blast shooting with nothing but the 28mm manual focus prime. I was not blown away by the lens, but I was not disappointed either. I might be tempted to go for the f/2 version, though.
Just to have a bit different presentation, I uploaded the images as a gallery: Vivitar 28mm/f2.8: A walkabout.
In this year’s first issue of Tähdet+Avaruus, there was a question sent by a reader about the distance that a lightning can be seen at. The answer referred to lightning seen in the upper parts of a cloud, which is silent when seen from farther than 15km away. The instant I read the answer, I realized I had shot such a phenomenon about a year ago. The Finnish wikipedia reveals that the phenomenon is called “crop lightning”, the proper english term seems to be “sheet lightning”. The phenomenon can be seen mainly in August, when the nights are already dark, but there are still thunders, and thus the finnish moniker “crop lightning” stems from an old belief that these silent lightnings have an effect in ripening the crop.
Unfortunately at the time of taking the picture, I didn’t realize the thunder sound was missing because of the distance, and therefore didn’t have the insight to look up the distance to the thunder cloud. Someone smarter and more knowledgeable in relation to thunderstorms might be able to calculate the distance to the cloud (of which you can only see the top) based on the average height of the cloud and the curvature of the earth. The picture was taken at 26.7.2008. The exposure was 4.0s at f/2.8, ISO100.
When arriving home at around midnight on thursday, I found before this scene brightly lit by a moon accompanied by a planet I later learned was Jupiter. Being tired from the ride home, I settled for a quick snap from our balcony. The exposure time is 15 seconds (at f/5.0, ISO100), and you can already see the Moon and Jupiter starting to elongate. At the back you can see Lake Vuojärvi and the lights of some houses on the opposite shore.
I’ve felt for a long time that I should be able to identify more of the constellations. I mean, I can instantly locate the Big Dipper (or Plough) that is part of Ursa Major (as can probably every kid over 5 years in Finland), and I even knew that I could locate Polaris based on the big dipper, just didn’t know the exact details. Hitting the books to learn constellations is just so boring compared to watching the real formations on the sky, but you’re not bloody likely to have an astronomy book when you’re outside watching, are you?
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Ever since I was a child, I’ve been fascinated with all things related to space and star sky. When I was little, I often gazed to the sky, wondering about the overflying satellittes, shooting stars and other phenomena of the sky. Even though reading the fantastic Tähdet & Avaruus (Stars & Space) magazine published by Ursa, the Finnish astronomical association, has often made me consider reviving the hobby in a more serious fashino, in the end I just never end up getting outside to watch the stars.
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Following several online photography forums, I’ve been flabbergasted by the general attitude towards the new emerging video features of the DSLR cameras such as Canon 5D Mk II, Pentax K7 and Nikon D90 and D300s. There seem to a lot of disdain, some carefully positive comments (”it doesn’t hurt”) and very little exuberance. As I tend towards the exuberance, I find this very odd, to tell you the truth.
As a person who recently (early this year) bought a video camera, and during that time got familiar with lots of video forums, I was expecting a totally different welcome for the video features in the new Pentax K7 from what I saw. I will try to answer to some criticism commonly thrown around in the photography forums. Finally, I will speculate about the reasons for this odd attitude towards Video-on-DSLR.
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The words “stop down metering” are often mentioned when usage of older manual focus glass (M42, Pentax-K, Pentax-M series of lenses) is discussed on camera forums. To stop down a lens means of course to change the used aperture, but you may wonder how it relates to light metering, at least if you’re not an old fart who grew up with film cameras (in other words, a person like me).
With modern SLR cameras, the lens is kept at a wide open aperture up until the shutter is pressed, at which point the lens is stopped down to the selected aperture, an exposure is taken and the aperture is again set wide open. In automatic exposure modes, for the camera to know the correct exposure time, it needs to know the f-stop to which the lens will be stopped down. The aperture can be selected either from the camera or the lens, but there needs to be a way (contacts and electronic circuits) to communicate the selected aperture between the lens and the camera body.
Older manual focus Pentax glass (M42 lenses with adapters, Pentax-M and Pentax-K series) lenses do not have the necessary contacts or electronics. This is why the lens needs to be stopped down to the desired aperture before the light measurement is made. This is called stop down metering. To make a stop down measurement on a K10D, you select the desired aperture from the aperture ring and press the Green button to set the shutter speed according to the metering. You can also use the lenses in Aperture Priority (Av) mode, but the metering will only be correct at the widest aperture.
The ability of even the newest Pentax DSLRs to utilize lenses going back at least 45 years is known to many Pentax shooters, and old but excellent Pentax glass is used with the help of various ( PK-, M42- mount) adapters by shooters of other camera brands, even on full frame cameras such as the Canon 5D.
Most Pentax shooters are focused on photography, not showing off or making a fashion statement. Therefore, it seems that Pentax shooters are often not averse to using old equipment if it produces great results. But if one does not own or inherit a set of lenses, it is often hard to know which lenses or accessories are worth the price and trouble to track down and buy. This information can be gleaned from perusing forums such as Pentax Forums or MF Forums, but I thought it would be a good idea to blog about some of the most valuable “Hidden Gems” for the Pentax cameras. In this post, I’ll start with the wide angle lens creating so much ado (even touted as the FA31mm Ltd replacement) on the PentaxForums: the Vivitar 28mm/f2.8 (or f2.5 or f2.0).
