Nice Relaxing Evening... Playing with my camera and the Christmas Tree.

I have been itching to try some tree lights shots this year. Decided I had waited long enough so I pulled out my Pentax 135mm f2.5 manual focus lens and had some fun.

Now you may ask why that focal length? Well a couple of reasons, first it is reasonably sharp & contrasty wide open which helps as I don't have any lenses with rounded aperture blades so if I stop down I get funny shaped out of focus lights in the background. More on that later. It is also a pretty sharp lens wide open too. I also liked the focal length as it helps to narrow the field of view and isolate the things I want in the picture.

The only drawback to the lens is the closest focusing distance is not fantastic (like 5-6 feet) so I don't get a lot of magnification out of it, plus the depth of field is rather thin at wide open apertures as well.

Well.. on to the pictures.

This is the only one I took that was "In focus" that I really liked, need to work on lighting.

This was deliberately out of focus, looking for a fairly dreamy look. Did this simply by putting the lens at the closest focus distance and then backing away until it looked pretty fuzzy. The change in shape of the color disks towards the edge is called "coma" I hadn't realized that this lens had that much, of course this is a rather extreme test of the lens.

Now these last 4 shots are to demonstrate different loosk I was able to achieve. All were taken from the exact same spot. You will notice an octagonal shape to the blur disks, that is due to the shape of the diaphragm of the lens, it has 8 blades.

The first two are at maximum focal distance (Infinity) The first at F4

This at F2.5

Now at Minimum Focus Distance and f 2.5

F4

Overall I like the effect and will play with it more, probably should pull out some other lenses too, just for fun.