My New Sigma 17-70

As mentioned previously, I bought a new lens, my first autofocus lens, and guess what? I LOVE IT!! Here a few samples of what it can do. I have hardly screatched the surface of how versatile a lens it is. It can literally focus so close that the subject is almost touching the front of the lens. It is prety sharp and I think I will really really like it. Really.

Here is a near 100% crop of the main part of the shot. This is using the natural light from the comparison shoot between the 3 lenses I posted a few days ago.

The original.

This is also a cropped shot but not quite as much as the first. Looking at the original, leaves you amazed at how sharp it is.

This shot was taken hand held at work, right after a patient gave me these flowers to take home to my wife.

These next three shots were taken at a park near my work. This was my first chance to play with my lens outdoors. This goose was moving quite quickly, and was a little too fast for the autofocus.

I love how wide this lens goes, it is the equivalent to 26mm on a film camera, and it is quite sharp corner to corner, with very little chromatic aberration. I just LIKE it.

A close up of a budding twig, this demonstrates the uselessness of autofocus with macro, it is best to just turn it off and do it yourself. I was trying for the bed, and got the little budlet right in front of it.

Yashica Vs. Pentax Vs. Sigma

One of my Photography buddies recently acquired a screwmount Yashica 28mm f2.8 lens. While I was arrranging to purchase a zoom from him (more about this later) he asked me if I could/would play with it and test it out. Always eager to play with another lens I said sure. This is my first try at a controlled test. I did OK with setting up lighting, but I think I had one flaw with my methodology, in that I used the focus confirmation indicator in my camera to confirm that the two manual focus lenses were focused. I think somehow that the Yashica focused a little toward the front of the subject, while the Pentax was spot on. The Sigma 17-70 I had the camera focus the first shot then switched to Manual focus mode, assuming from chimping the LCD that it was correctly focused, I think it also was slightly front focused as well.

I will try to post a few 100% crops later to show the differences, but you should be able to see which was the sharpest from these shots.

I shot all lenses at wide open (f3.5 for the Pentax k-28mm f3.5 and the Sigma 17-70, and f2.8 for the Yashica 28mm f2.8.) with the Sigma zoomed to 28mm. Then at f4, 5.6, 8, 11, and 16. Except for minor differences in color, all were quite sharp at f11 and f16. At f8 they were all reasonably good with the Pentax slightly ahead in sharpness. The Pentax was by far the best performer at f3.5 (wide open). The Sigma tended to overexpose which I think compromised it's IQ a little bit as well.


Yashica f2.8 Yashica f4.0

Yashica f5.6

Yashica f8

Yashica f11

Yashica f16

Pentax f3.5 Pentax f4.0

Pentax f5.6

Pentax f8.0

Pentax f11

Pentax f16

Sigma f3.5 Sigma f4.0

Sigma f5.6

Sigma f8

Sigma f11

Sigma f16

Two Temples in one Night

It is a wonderful part of living in Utah that you may drive past several temples in one day. Temple building is a big part of the worship of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. (a.k.a. the Mormon Church, though this is not the official name)

Utah is the only place on the face of the planet where you can do that. Recently we went for a drive and decided to go past two of them, so I could get an idea of angles and sites to shoot from. I am greatly desirious of taking opportunities in the future, when I think the light/sunset/sunrise etc... will be favorable, to shoot as good of shots as are taken by professionals and sold here in Salt Lake.

These three I liked, the first is the Draper Temple, the second and third are the Mt. Timpanogos Temple. I have been using more and more, the sophisticated tools that I have at my disposal in Photoshop to adjust the image to look closer to reality and more pleasing as best I can.

I hope you like them.

Last Light

This is my first long distance/infinity focus shot with my Vivitar 200mm. I missed the best of the light, didn't know it was there that day. I need to train my kids to be better spotters.

I love seeing the last light of the day on this mountain which can be seen from my front porch. It is just an amazing sight when it is lit up just right.

I am still working on geting my screwmount adapter to fit just right, the flange is not quite thick enough and without some kind of spacer I can't get the bayonet to turn into the mount. But if the spacer is too thick then I lose infinity focus. Guess I should have just spent the money for the real thing from Pentax. I am planning to try and get a better lit shot at some point.

Moving Clouds at Night.

As you saw in an earlier post I had a picture that I took at night that was a fairly scenic shot of the mountains from above my boyhood home. I decided to try to replicate that in a more planned way. I really enjoyed how the clouds were blurred by movement during the exposure.

I decided to do a little less playing with the colors than on my previous image. I have to admit I am temped to download a program to stitch these two images together and see what that looks like.

Taken from Alta High School, just west of the Football Stadium.

Techincal info: Pentax K200D, Pentax K-28mm f3.5 @ f8, approximately 2min exposure, hand timed with wired remote release. Processed from RAW to TIFF in Pentax PhotoLab, levels adjustment and cropping in PhotoShop 6.0.

Early Testing of a Vivitar 200mm f3.5 Screwmount (M42) lens.

I took all of these within moments of each other all on tripod ISO 100, I found that as I stopped down I had to compensate more, I will have to play with that more in the future.

I really wasn't impressed with f3.5 at the closest focus, nothing was spectacularly sharp, I thought it sharpened up nicely by f5.6 and f11 seemed really nice, though f22 was visibly softening again.

I hope to take some more interesting shots when it warms up and see what the bokeh is like.

For A Forum Member

A week or so ago a member of DPReview posted a thread about trying to get some roofs lined up in a shot, this was my contribution, and was shot with the intention of posting it. These were taken on Valentines Eve as well. Both with 135mm. Here is the thread.

http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/readflat.asp?forum=1036&thread=30943027

On a Clear Night the Mountains Are Beautiful

Went to the East side of the Valley Sunday night for a Valentines delivery. Decided to try for a shot I have been wanting to get for a long time. Usually when the Moon is full, this is an OK next best until the next full moon and clear day. The key is the clarity of the air. In the valley we get some inversions that make this kind of shot hard to do.

This first shot is the JPEG straight out of the camera, 28mm f3.5 and 30sec.


This is from the RAW with a Tungsten WB setting in the RAW converter and a little selective desaturation of red and magenta. I like it!

Valentines Evening at the Lake

Valentines Day was a good one for me in many ways. Least of these ways but most important for this blog was the Photos I took on the way home! This is the same Temple as in a very recent post just further down the street. I have done fairly light processing on most of these except the last, which I will comment on later.

There is a bridge over part of Oquirrh Lake west of the Temple, this is taken right on the east end of that bridge, I was happy to get the angle and light I did. Taken with my 135mm


This was turning around and looking west very shortly after, we get some awesome clouds here in the winter sometimes. I love the drama. 135mm.

Taken just North of the bridge, if you look closely you can see part of the stone spiral/ramp in the bottom left of the picture. 50mm,

This is just South of the bridge, the sky was just awesome and I loved the reflection in the water and the texture in the ice on the edge of the shore. There are geese that winter on the lake and get in and out right where I was shooting from. I tried for a slightly different color balance with each shot in Photoshop, basically what looked good to my eye. Please comment and let me know which you like better. 28mm @ f8

This one was my absolute favorite, and I took the time to convert the RAW file to TIFF, and then Photoshop it. I do believe I get less noise and better detail in the sky and darker areas with that workflow. 28mm @f8.

Evening Sunset At Oquirrh Lake

I am excited that I am starting to get sunsets while I am on my way home from work. I have been doing the go in and home in the dark routine for too long. I have been wanting to get more shots of and around this lake close to my home. This sunset wasn't quite as nice as I hoped for, but I was glad to see it for once. This was taken hand held, with my Pentax 28mm, @f5.6.

Warm-Up Shots

This was taken in the morning of Feb 13th, 28mm. this may also become a favorite of mine as well, it matches with the angle of sunrises for a large part of the year, and I can frame out a lot of distracting stuff.

This is a new Temple being built in my area, My long term plan is to take a picture worth printing that is as good as the professional ones that will be taken. Towards that aim I am taking opportunities to take pictures at different times of the day, seasons etc... to learn the best angles and lighting/lens combo. There will be more lights added/turned on as time goes by, this was the first or second night that they left any exterior lights on and I was excited to see how it looked. I didn't have my tripod so I had to up the ISO and hand hold, so the grain/noise is nothing to write home about but I think I like this angle, will need to adjust a little though I did have to clone part of a tree out.

A Rose is a Rose

I have been wanting to try some Macro (Or close up) photography, lacking a macro lens I just decided to get as close as I could and crop a little bit. I liked this one the best of the 25 or so shots I took, for some reason the red ones just didn't look all that good. sigh.....

Anyway this was taken with my k 135mm f2.5 at f4 and 2sec shutter (to allow me time to fire my flash by hand) with hand held/triggered flash. I have cropped a bit from the original. What do you think?

Thought it would be fun to do a Black and White conversion as well.