Saturday Morning BEFORE the snow!

Got woken up early by the kiddos so I decided to try and catch some of the early morning light, up where I had seen some buds coming up the other day. Sadly the sun went behind clouds before I got up there, but I did have a little fun.

These first 3 shots were taken with my Lens Reversing Ring and an old Canon FD 50mm f1.8, yikes a canon lens on a Pentax Camera..... The 4th was taken with my Pentax SMC K-28mm f3.5 reversed.

I'm still figuring out the extreme shallow depth of field thing. I think it will take awhile, though I bet it will help to have no wind!

The rest of this series was with my new Pentax SMC DA 55-300 f4-5.8. I pushed the ISO to 400 and cropped a couple for composition only. I must say that this lens is impressing me more and more every day! Considering it was fairly early in the day and overcast it was able to gather enough light to be quite reasonably sharp.

This guy did need a little shadow compensation.

I Just Love Sunrises

I just LOVE Sunrises of course some are more exotic than others, this morning was less than exotic but still beautiful in it's own way.

As those of you who have been following my blog know I recently bought a telephoto lens, which is not my usual type of lens for landscapes. That said, I have been using it for landscape work and it has been performing well for me.

On my way to work today I stopped to take a few shots of the impending sunrise and a shot of the Oquirrh Mountain Temple from a familiar vantage point but during the day not at night.

This peak is the aptly named "Storm Mountain", at least that is what I always have heard it called since I was a kid.

I loved the contrast of the flag against the snowy mountain, I had to flip it horizontally though to get the flag in the correct orientation. Still thinking of a square crop and then add the vignette but not sure if it would be hokey or not.

Dawn's first light.

A Few From Monday Night

Ran away at sunset to try to get some nice photos, the sunset didn't co-operate but the light was sure interesting. Here are the ones I liked.

Similar to one I took last June with my Pentax K-135 f2.5, would have to do a lot of clean up to get this looking that good. The 55-300 is not quite as sharp but does a good job!

Racked out to 300mm, I lowered the tripod to make it more stable, which helped tremendously. Though I think there is a little more sharpness to be wrung out of the lens with my newer tripod I am expecting.

Sunset over the lake. Really liked this shot!

I think I will need to try this later in the summer when the sun sets behind the bridge. May not get that smooth of water but I will definitely try!

I tried this with varying amounts of fill flash to bring me out, but I found that it just looked kinda fakey. This more accurately captures what I saw as I sat and watched the light fade. this is one of my favorite times of the day.

Lens Reversing Ring=FUN!

I am just getting to know this fun new accessory, it is a Bower 52mm Lens Reversing Ring from www.adorama.com for Pentax mount. I have mounted my Pentax K 50mm f1.4 and K 28mm f3.5 lenses.

The first shot is from the 28mm wide open I believe it is about a 2:1 reproduction ratio meaning that the image on my sensor is 2x the size of the object in real life.

This is from my 50mm stopped down a little, it has an impossibly thin depth of field wide open. It is close to 1:1.

This is a shot with my Sigma 17-70 at about 1:3 it works great as a macro lens but the working distance is almost touching the front element at really close focus which makes lighting hard. It will go to 1:2.3.

These were taken in a south facing window on a hazy saturday afternoon. I could get a deeper depth of field but it would take stopping down more and that entailed shutter speeds too slow for handholding. I will probably end up needing a Macro Rail should I get more into this.

This is closest focus with the K 28mm @ f5.6 ish (Can't remember) the slightest shake makes for motion blur. Definitely a case for using a tripod.

Back to the 50mm @ f8