Just a little more of that wonderful sunrise!

OK, I admit it I am a sucker for sunrises, the mundane ones, the purple/orange ones, the fiery read ones, and the ones where I just look at out the window and roll over and go back to sleep. Love them all! Some last longer than others some don't. The one this morning probably was about average but seemed shorter because I was trying to get shots while the color was good. Really should have paid more attention to when the sky was lightening.

Anyway, as I noticed the potential for a good sunrise I grabbed my bag (my tripod is always in my truck) and headed out. Seeing as I have been wanting to use my new zoom I kept it on at the start, that led to the panorama in my previous post. I probably should have tipped the lens up and tried for another row, but the sky was moving fast and I figured that it would mess up the panorama software so.... I popped on my trusty Sigma 10-20 and took a few shots, and found myself wishing to be a little bit wider... GASP!!! yes even wider than that amazing ultrawide zoom! So I did some gentle stitching of the three shots I took, nothing too crazy. This is what I got. Likely will end up being cropped to the pixel dimensions of my monitor for use as a wallpaper. Or some other more nefarious purpouse when I need a sky.... ;-)

This is a HDR quickie taken as I arrived at the Oquirrh Mountain Temple. As you can see from the watermarks I have not paid for the full zoot software and didn't like the shot enough to clone the watermarks out. Interesting perspective though.

These are from the same series of shots just processed differently, I think they would both make good 8x10 crops instead of 8x12. Do you think I should add them to my gallery of Temple Photo's for sale on Zenfolio? They are certainly striking. Hmm... Originals taken with my Pentax K-28mm f3.5 manual everything classic.

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.