LBA- Pentax DA 55-300 f4-5.8 First Shots

Alrighty! I got my long awaited new Tele Zoom yesterday and I managed to carve out a little bit of time to play with it. Here are my first few test shots. For a consumer level zoom at it's price point and SIZE/WEIGHT. I am pretty chuffed, it may not be as sharp as some zooms that cost 3-4x as much (Big surprise there wot?) but it is acceptably sharp. This is going to be a hiking, active outdoors lens and as such weight and form factor are a big deal. At some point I will post some comparison pictures for ya, but suffice it to say that with hood reversed it fits in my camera bag nicely and will go in my camelbak in the soft case it came with very easily, and will be a welcome addition. The last time I climbed Mt Timpanogos (September of '08 if you want to go back to my archives) The longest lens I had was an old, but very sharp, manual focus 135mm f2.5, I really wished for more reach at that point and this will scratch that itch.

Moving forward here are some test shots, the first is a 10 or 11 shot panorama shot at 55mm and stitched in Photoshop Elements. Unfortunately, I neglected to turn the camera to portrait orientation so I did cut off a lot of the sky, and I forgot to manually set the WB so I had a color change partway through the shot. I will fix that later, I shoot RAW+JPEG and I can go back and re-develop the RAW with a consistent WB. I am not sure how wide it will show when you click on it, but it you really want send me an e-mail and I will send you a compressed JPEG.

EDIT: I have now fixed my WB issues, you can download the HUGE original here or a slightly smaller 1080pixel high one here. The password for either of them is "Wide" Everybody else who goes there but doesn't read my blog won't get to see them large. Feel special?

Here is a moon shot from my front porch, I found that f11 gave me a better exposure, f8 was a little blown out.... not sure why.

Here is a 100% crop (or will be when you click on it) not bad for what it is. NOT bad at all!

(Do think it would be a wee bit sharper with a better tripod, which I plan to fix soon.)

All these were taken at ISO 400 (Hence the noisy skies) and f8 and 300mm except as noted. Pretty decent for my first try. Need to follow the advice of a forum member though. "Get a BIG lens and get closer" I have the lens now I need to get closer. The only processing for this series is a slight levels adjust and one pass of USM at 20% Radius of 60 and threshold of 0.

This was at 55mm, the whole flock of gulls took off suddenly, very loud occurance!

Tight crop.

This guy was landing and I caught him at the point of touchdown, this was straightened and cropped, but not much else.