Mark Cassino Photography - Mark's Blog

Two weeks ago I received a Pentax K10D digital SLR. I had put in my order for this camera with B&H Photo, based on the specifications and trust that Pentax would deliver. After a week of testing and tying the camera, I can only say that I’m more than satisfied. This is not so much of a review of the K10D, as a recording of my subject reactions to it. But then, I guess that’s what most reviews ultimately are!

I bought the camera plus lens kit, which included the Pentax DA 18-55mm lens. Along with the camera and lens, B&H offered a bundle including a SanDisk Extreme III 2-gigabyte SD card.

Here’s a rundown of what I like – and don’t like – about this camera. (The first list is a lot longer than the second.)

On the like list –

1. Image quality: As with the *ist series, this camera offers first rate color, detail, and sharpness. I shoot RAW so I take responsibility for the overall image quality, but I haven’t seen any significant limitations on what this camera is capable of. Noise is low, color accuracy is high, and detail and clarity are first rate.

2. Build in Anti-Shake: The K10D sports a sensor based anti-shake system. For the last few years I’ve envied the availability of Image Stabilized or Vibration Reduction lenses available for Canon and Nikon systems. With the arrival of the K10D I now have almost two dozen anti-shake enable lenses, ranging from 14mm to 800mm (400 + 2x teleconverter.)

So how well does the anti-shake work? Here are a couple of test shots of a venerable Argoflex TLR. They were taken hand held at 1/8th of a second using the 18-55mm at 55mm, f8. These are both 'actual pixel' shots of the camera, the top one taken with shake reduction enabled, the bottom one without. As you can see – the anti shake function adds a lot of sharpness!

(A full image of this venerable camera can be found later in this post.)

I’m looking forward to seeing how the Pentax anti-shake feature works with macro photography – with a little luck, next summer will result in a bevy or more / better dragonflies!

3. Speed: This camera is fast! With the Extreme III card you are never more than a few seconds from the next shot, even shooting large RAW DNG files. For JPG shooting the speed is outstanding.

4. 10.2 effective megapixels. This is a noticeable step up from the 6.1 mexapixel *ist-D. At the end of the day, I don’t think this camera will make my medium format gear obsolete for landscape shooting. But as digital specs march forward it’s only a matter of time…

5. Viewfinder: the K10D viewfinder is bright, with a decent level of magnification. The
*ist-D finder was good – better than many other digital SLR’s that I’ve played with – but the 10D takes it another step forward.

6. Large LCD: Wow! I can read the menus without my glasses. And the detailed zoom really lets me know what’s sharp (or not). Great!

7. DNG RAW files: If you shoot RAW, and you want to make sure that you can access those RAW files in the future, a open standard for RAW shooting makes sense. The Adobe DNG standard isn’t as universal as TIFF or JPG, but it certainly is a step in the right direction away from proprietary RAW formats that may or may not be supported by future software. If you don’t care about this – the proprietary Pentax PEF format is also an option.

8. On demand RAW shooting: I seldom shoot JPG’s, but when I do there is always that shot or two where I wish I could quickly flip over to RAW mode just for a shot or two. The K10D has a nifty RAW button – if you are shooting in Jpeg mode just hit this button and you get an on-off RAW shot (and a JPG to boot.) Nice.

9. Fast AF: Back in the film camera days, Pentax always took a lot of heat over their pokey and low-tech AF systems. The AF on the K10D is exceptionally fast, and works great in low light. The *ist-D was good, this camera is excellent. Pentax has also opened the door to future hypersonic lenses – we’ll see what the future holds.

10. User programmable settings memory: Well, that’s a mouthful. What it amounts to is that this camera lets you decide what gets reset when you turn off the camera, and what settings are retained in memory. The *ist-D used to drive me crazy when shooting macros, because the 2 second mirror pre-fire mode was always reset after the camera powered off. So I’d inevitably take a shot with it off, and then have to reset it. Now I decided whether that – and a slow of other functions like exposure compensation, auto bracketing, white balance, sensitivity, etc go back to default after power on, or stay were they were last set.

11. Show shutter flash synch in aperture priority: Prior Pentax Cameras could only handle slow shutter synch in manual mode – which added an unnecessary step to shooting birds with slow shutters speeds and fill flash. At last – slow shutter synch is selectable for aperture priority. I may just dust off my birding lenses…

12. Full backwards compatibility with K Mount lenses. As with the *ist series, you can use any K mount lens, no matter how old, with the K10D. For Pre-A lenses – really old lenses with no program mode capabilities – you are limited to stop down metering. Pentax has made this fairly painless – just hit a button and the lens stops down and takes a reading. For A and later lenses virtually all functions work, though you do have to input the focal length to get Anti-Shake to work with an older lens.

13. Post Exposure Histogram Display: The K10D offers a host of post exposure information displays. Aside from the standard histogram, you can see the red, green, and blue channel histograms separately. The camera can be set to enable blown out highlights to flash or under exposed shadows to flash.

14. Build Quality / User ergonomics: This is one solid camera. Feels good in the hand, offers a vertical batter grip as well. It continues the Pz-1p and *ist-D dual control wheel design ethic. With hyper-manual and program shift modes, you can set the camera to offer suggested exposure options, and quickly and easily adjust those on the fly. Since most features are selected via switches, buttons, and dials, there is less of the annoying (and time consuming) drilling down into menus.

15. The User setting: One of my favorite settings from the Pz-1p camera, that I’m glad to see back on the K10D. This setting lets you set a favorite user profile, and quickly switch to it with just the twist of the mode dial.

16. The usual Pentax features: In addition to the above, the usual Pentax features are available in this camera. By that I mean the 2 second mirror pre-fire for macro shooting, the DOF preview incorporated in the collar around the shutter button, and the general build quality and ergonomics.

17. Weather sealing: I’m pretty unabashed about using my cameras out in bad weather, and so far I’ve not had any problems. But now at least I have a camera that is actually sealed against the elements. Well – a second camera that’s weather sealed. The Pentax LX had similar sealing.

So those are things I really like. Here are a few things that may or may not be important:

1. The 22 bit color conversion factor: the sensor in this camera records 22 bit per channel data, which is then translated down to 12 bit per channel for final saves (in RAW mode.) This may just be a bit of specmanship – a technical bragging point – but the overall image quality is excellent, so who cares how its achieved.

2. Extended bracketing mode: This feature lets you choose to bracket white balances, sharpness, and contrast levels. Cool – but as a RAW shooter I can’t say I need it.

3. Digital Preview: Basically, with this enabled you compose the shot and press the DOF preview button. The shutter snaps and you see a digital preview of the shot – complete with histograms and flashing high lights / low lights (if selected). Neat – but unless you are really short on memory cards, why not just take the shot and re-shoot if it’s not what you want? The camera is so fast, you won’t need to spend a lot of time waiting for it to write to the card or something.

4. Rechargeable battery: Some review sites have voiced some rather idiotic comments on this subject, suggestion that prior Pentax DSLR’s weren’t serious contenders without rechargeable batteries. I’ve also seen some absurd numbers about battery life using AA batteries (like 80 shos per set of batteries.)

I for one liked using AA batteries in my older Pentax DSLR’s. In the *ist-D a standard set of AA Lithium batteries could produce upwards of 1200 exposures (I routinely logged 1400 –1500 when I tracked it.) They are cheap, they are everywhere, and I’d rather be able to run off to a drugstore and buy new batteries than have to wait to recharge a semi-proprietary battery. So I’m ambivalent to the new rechargeable batteries in the K10D.

That said – I picked up a generic spare battery and will add a couple more to be sure to be able to meet extended shooting needs. (They are supposed to be good for ~700 shots – we’ll see.) I don’t anticipate any problems here – I do think I’d prefer the old AA approach.

5. APS-C Sensor Size: I’ll confess to some ambivalence to this format. I don’t see anything magical (or even very logical) about the 135 format (the 24x35mm film format a.k.a. know as 35mm film). I like how the APS sized sensor adds reach to my telephoto and macro lenses. I also like how the smaller format sensor works with the ‘sweet spot’ in most 35mm lenses – the center portion where sharpness is at it’s peak and distortion is at it’s minimum. But I still love shooting at a wide angle. The 18-55mm kit lens that came with the camera is a step in the right direction, and I may just need to break down and purchase some DA lenses, made to work with the APS sized sensor.

And now the even shorter list – the one thing I don’t like about the K10D:

1. P-TTL Flash (only): As I count it, Pentax has gone through 3 generations of TTL flashes. There were analog TTL flashes, digital flashes, and the newest P-TTL flashes. P-TTL is by far the best for exposure accuracy, and offers extended synch speeds (it will synch at any shutter speed, not matter how fast) but it’s not perfect. At least not for the specialized purposes I use flash for. For one thing – it must be used with a lens that can exchange information with the body. That excludes many older lenses, and also reverse mounted lenses for extreme macro use. The older TTL modes did not have this restriction.

As a result – if I want to take snow crystal shots with this great new camera, I either have to use manual flash or go back to stacking lenses or some other means of gaining extreme magnification.

Oh well – the worse case scenario is that the *ist-D has a permanent job as the official snow crystal camera, and I’ll look at upgrading my current P-TTL flash (the AF360FGZ) to something with more power for general shooting.

Aside from this one nit, I can’t find much to fault in this camera. It’s great to see a small, individualistic company like Pentax come out swinging, and actually hold their own against much larger competitors. It’s particularly heartening to see that they seemed to have listened to feedback from users, and have worked hard to build a camera that is truly responsive to the wants and needs many people have expressed. It’s no wonder that the K10D is wining awards and accolades, and let’s hope it’s a sign of even better things to come from Pentax.

“If the little fox, after nearly completing the crossing, gets his tail in the water, nothing is accomplished..”

"Those are pearls that were his eyes."

It’s been snowing here in west Michigan, the steady wave after wave of lake effect snow that comes with the first real blast of arctic air. And so tonight brought the second round of snowflake photography of the winter.

Unlike the wildflowers or dragonfly chronicles, I have few new observations to offer about day to day changes in the environment. The garage remains essentially unchanged.

The sustained cold spell has meant that the garage has cooled down quickly, and unlike last year when it took weeks for the interior temperature to drop comfortably below freezing, this winter the garage is already quite cold.

So – on with the snow crystal photography.

First off, I decided to abandon using the new Pentax K10D for this venture. It’s a great camera and I’ll be posting a rave review of it in due time, but it really is not the best tool for this job. I need TTL flash that works with an archaic system of bellows, extension tubes, and reverse mounted lenses. The K10D’s flash system is marvelous – but no longer has the backwards compatibility to work with this kind of setup. So, my trusty *ist-D has a permanent commission.

So tonight I picked up more or less where I left off, catching snow flakes on a glass plate. I was not happy with the results of session from a few days ago. I have my excuses – the snow crystals were of poor quality, I was struggling to adapt to new gear, the garage had not quite cooled down enough, etc… Tonight ‘s results are a bit better – I can raise some of the same complaints, but I feel a little closer to the flow of things now.

After all – one of my best snowflake photographs was taken on a March day. Then the crystals were only so-so and in the warm temperatures they melted as they hit the glass. But still the results were fine.

When you enter a body of water, you walk through the shallow areas. That’s the awkward phase. But suddenly you reach a point where the water lifts you, and if you can swim awkwardness is gone and movement is easy. And then you reach the point where the current carries you along, and you are really in the flow of things.

At this point, with snowflake photography, I’m still wading into the river. My ankles are wet. I waded into it with wildflower photography last spring and with dragonfly photos in the summer. Eventually the current took hold, and I drifted along for a while. Maybe my sorrow at the passing of the dragons was just an expression of the frustration of being washed ashore again.

Better snow crystals are on the way - maybe not in the next post, or even the post after, but in time.

The handful of snow flake photographs from tonight's session can be found in the Image Stream.

Although late fall and early winter is a definite off season for outdoor photography in Michigan, I still carry a Holga or other toy camera around in the car. It’s more or less drive-by shooting – when something of interest catches my eye I either hold the camera up to the window, or hop out of the car, and grab a quick shot.

Here are a few recent (late October – November) shots. .

“Waiting for a Train” is probably the best of the batch. Probably because I had so much time available to work on perfecting the shot (I really was waiting on a rather long train.). There’s something appealing about the basic sense of perspective in a shot like this.

Scanning the film introduced a few annoyances, though. I often marvel at the ability of the film scanner to pull detail out of the thinnest of negatives. In this case the lower potion of the train is all but clear on the film – there’s nothing there, not light got in and hit those silver crystals.

But still the scanner tries to pull more detail out. In this case the result is a lot of noise mucking up what should be the dark, near silhouette of the train. Well, maybe a re-scan will help things along….

Winter has pounced on Michigan like a cat landing on an unsuspecting mouse. Where just a week or so ago we were enjoying balmy temperatures in the mid sixties, now waves of lake effect snow are rolling in. The temperatures today didn't get much above 20 F.

And so – time to start snow crystal photography again! This year I’m somewhat prepared – I put together the bellows, macro lens, and lighting setup a few weeks ago, and also cleared out a small space on the table in the garage.

Usually, it takes several days after the first serious cold snap and snow storm before the garage actually cools down to a temperature below freezing – but the deep cold of the last 48 hours has moved that process along pretty well.

And so this evening marked the first snow crystal session of the winter. Overall, it was not too productive.

The first attempt at shooting snow crystals is usually an exercise in re-learning. It’s been months since the last shoot, and getting the eye for the fine focus (no easy thing looking through a foot of extension), lining up the shots, dealing the virtually no depth of field – all this comes back, but only after a few hours of fiddling, remembering, and getting back in synch.

And then there is the snow. Today’s snow was (and still is) coming down too hard, too clumped together. The individual crystals that I did try to get had bounced out of larger clumps, and showed the signs of that passage. The air is more humid that it will be later in the season, and the snow crystals that do emerge individually have more effervescence on them, than the crisp clear crystals of mid winter.

Topping it off, I decided to use the new Pentax K10D for this work. Having only had the camera for a few days, I wasn't sure how it would fare in the cold, and with this sort of extreme macro photography.

The K10D had a few surprises in store for me as well. First off what the discovery that P-TTL does not seem to work with a reverse mounted lens on manual bellows and extension tubes. As a result the flash fired at full power no matter what. It’s always possible that I had things configured wrong – working with long flash cords in sub-freezing temperatures is an invitation for error – but the flash kept defaulting back to just plain “TTL” mode – an older setting not supported by the new camera body.

Well, manual flash is pretty easy to use with a digital body, so I just flipped over to that, adjusted the power settings, and started shooting. The speed of the new camera (its very fast) made it a real pleasure to work with, and the large LCD in back made it easy to assess the quality of shots as they were being taken. And happily, the rechargeable battery seemed to hold up despite the cold and prolonged period of operation.

At the end of the day, I’ll probably go back to the 6 megapixel *ist-D for snow crystal work, if only for the flexibility of TTL flash and being able to use the body’s exposure compensation to fine tune the flash power.

As for the day’s shoot – well, nothing here that would make it into the permanent snow crystal gallery. But then I think about that bleak day in March when I took the first wildflower shots of the spring – and how a pretty good wildflower season rose up out of that humble beginning.

Snowflakes are winter’s wildflowers, and I hope this is the start of a good season.

Yesterday I picked up a new digital camera – the Pentax K10D. After charging the battery I took a few shots of the website maintenance staff, and then called it quits, figuring that I’d save the battery for shooting out in the storm today.

Of course – I knew it would storm today. Everyone knew that a weather system was passing through the media hype was predicting up to a foot of snow by this evening.

But of course, the weather forecasters were wrong, as usual. But the weather today was still nasty.

Early this morning, it was pouring rain on top of a few inches of snow (which rapidly turned to slush.) The temperature was just below the freezing point, so the rain was freezing into an ice sheet at a remarkably fast pace. Fortunately, that didn’t last long After that, a light snow settled in and as the temperatures dropped, the snow picked up and left a blanket over the region. 

Today was the day I had set aside to test out the new camera, so I packed up a purely digital kit (the K10D and *ist-D) and headed out into the snow storm.

Since firearms deer season is over, I decided to head off to the Allegan Game Area. I last visited Allegan in mid September (!) so I was way overdue to touch base with the area again. I was also eager to see how the new camera would perform.

After a slow drive along an icy M-89, I finally made it to the Allegan woods. My first stop was the Coreopsis Field along 46th street. This is a prime insect and wildflower shooting area in the summer months – but as you can see from the first image, it was pretty bleak today!

I pushed into the scrubby woods along the border of the field, hoping to extract an interesting tree shot. It’s hard to describe just how much time and attention goes into lining up the trees, framing and re-framing, till the shot seems to be just right. I decided to use the K10D handheld at ISO400. (If it works for Neopan, it should work for the digicam as well….)

I also used the DA 18-55 lens that came with the camera for all of these shots. Though it is a bargain lens, it seems to be competent once stopped down. Between the relatively high ISO and the built in Shake reduction, I was happy with the degree of sharpness and detail in the images. In fact – I’m pretty surprised at how big an increase in detail the 10 megapixel camera shows over the 6 megapixel *ist-d. The new camera seems to do a much better job capturing the nuance and detail in scenes with lots of data – like brambly woods – better than I expected.

 

Of course – the amount of info available to capture today was limited. The heavy snow and intermittent waves of fog that would rise up and blow through the woods all made for very low contrast scenes. As good as the evaluative meter in the K10D seems to be, it was still thrown off by the blanket of snow, so most of these shots were taken at +1 stop exposure compensation. And believe it or not - these are color shots (I actually pumped up the saturation) - it was obviously a pretty bleak day.

After stomping around the now barren field, I headed over to 126th street to dead end near Swan Creek and the wildlife refuge. The narrow two track was mucky and slick with snow – and it was a fun game to keep moving fast enough to not get stuck in the mud, but slow enough not to skid off into the woods.

The parking lot at the end of the road would have been filled with hunter’s vehicles just a week ago, but today was empty. It’s almost always empty when I visit, and I should feel lucky to be able to enjoy the 10 months of the year when this place is more or less just deserted, and I can wander around for hours without seeing a soul.

Swan Creek was its usual picturesque self. Here again the shake reduction and ISO speed made it perfectly feasible to shoot hand held at F16, for maximum depth of field.

I filled up the memory card for the K10D at Swan Creek. It took almost a hlaf an hour to dump it onto the X’s drive II, so I decided to head back home and take a look at the images for the day.

A this point in time, my impressions of the camera are excellent. Sitting at the computer, processing RAW files is not as much fun as listing to the radio and dunking film in the developer du-jour, but one thing doesn’t preclude the other. For now, I have to say that the increase in resolution from 6 to 10.2 megapixels is greater than I expected – and since the relatively low resolution of DSLR’s for landscape shooting has been my major concern with them, it looks like the digital tide is sweeping in faster than ever…

A few more photos:

Ok – I may be complaining about autumn and winter and the all too short days etcetera… but in reality it’s been quite warm here in SW Michigan. Last year at this time the ground was white with snow, and we had some of the coldest weather of the season. This year things have been unseasonably warm.

So, on the Friday after Thanksgiving I ventured out to the McLinden Nature Trails, camera in tow. It was a gorgeous warm sunny day – more like late September than the end of November.

 I had a couple of hidden agendas. For one thing, I had just placed my order for a new digital camera – the 10 megapixel Pentax K10D. With the improved resolution, build in anti-shake device (which turns virtually any lens into an image stabilized lens) this camera will certainly be another nail in film’s coffin.

So – I decided to grab a few rolls of 35mm black and white films - Ilford delta 100, Neopan 400, and my last roll of Plus-X 125 – and go for a bit of a walk. What better time to fully embrace film, and a good session developing it – than while waiting in expectation for the latest digital camera.

That’s one agenda. I also just wanted to get out an do some shooting. None of the projects that I’ve been contemplating seem to be engaging any more, none of the stuff that I just plain have fun doing – shooting bugs and botanical close-ups, for example – are available. Even the fall colors have given way to the just plain bleak and boring Midwestern landscape. So I figured it was a good time to just get a camera in my hands, and shoot on impulse – what better way to blow off a November funk.

And lastly – the most hidden agenda of all – I harbored hopes that maybe, just perhaps, there would be one hardy meadowhawk or late Mourning Cloak still out and about, offering the chance for one last session of insect photography.

Well, the tick frost in the shaded areas – even in mid afternoon – quickly dashed those hopes. Yes – it was has been unseasonably warm, but it still get cold at night. And aside from a few small gnats and mosquitoes, there were no bugs to be found. 

I turned my attention to trees, hoping to capture some of the stark ‘Novemberness’ of them. Trees are always around, so more remarkable than others.

I brought a light kit with me to the park. I had picked McLinden because this weekend was the middle of firearms deer hunting season – and my usual haunts are open hunting areas. And while McLindon is technically a city park, even there the dull thuds of hunting rifles drifted through the trees – maybe people hunting in the park, maybe on adjoining land.

I took a light kit – actually, I thought I took the Pentax Mz-S, FA 20-35 zoom, and FA 28-70 zoom. But I mistakenly grabbed the F 17-28 fisheye zoom instead of the 28-70 (they are about the same size) and so my focal length options were wide, and wider.

I don’ think anything notable came out of this November ramble. I had wanted to shoot the fallen tree for a while, and I was glad to have the chance to work with it. As the afternoon wore on, and as I looped around the trail to find the sun shining in my eyes, I became more interested in the play of the sunlight on the leaves, the grass, and water in the small stream that runs through the park.

So I spent more time trying just to capture the feel of light in the local, with less and less regard for the subject matter itself. Somehow, being liberated from the subject matter is a compelling and ongoing photographic project unto itself.

So I particularly like the sunlight glimmering on the leaves scatted on the path in the park. Leaves on the ground are at least a minimalist subject, and any dynamic in the photo comes from just light itself.

I've mentioned Harry Callahan in a few recent posts. My first exposure to his work was in the form of a Hallmark Calendar for 1967, simply labelled "Photographs By Harry Callahan." The photo for November is "Chicago, 1950" and the subject is simply leaves on the ground.

Seeing this photo was a marvelous experience for me - it's a great image, but more than that it is a radical image. It works, but has none of the mechanisms that make a photo work. If it was posted on Photo Blink or Photo Critique.Net, Photo.net, or any of the other myriad internet photo sites - it would be ignored, laughed at, or 'critiqued' to conform to the commercial-pop standards that reign. Seeing that photo was a wake up call for me - and it weighed heavily on my mind as I was out shooting on this November walk.

On a technical note – the Delta 100 and Plus-X were developed in Rodinol 1:50, the Neopan in Microcol-X, 1:3.

More photos: