First outdoor Pentax *ist DS photos

[anandi]

Thought I'd post these here for the benefit of anyone interested in 28mm shots on a *ist DS. In particular an inexpensive Pentax K-mount 28/2.8. They can be found here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/aanandi/sets/72157602420650996/

For reference these were shot in Raw, and converted to JPEG without tweaking the settings (done in PS CS3) or applying any of the usual unsharpen mask and colour correction/contrast tweaking I'd do on a shot that counted. I applied the white balance setting of cloudy daylight to the shots.

In general the cheapie lens renders colour well, flares a bit when shot into the light and is better at close shots than sharpness at distance. Manual focus isn't too bad to judge in the light, and stopped down a little doesn't matter as much I guess. The Av mode is all I'm looking for out of metering.

These aren't meant to be particularly nice, but critiquing is welcome as are suggestions on getting the most out of this camera (without buying lots of expenseive DA lenses 🙂 )

Cheers,
-Amit

p.s. next up is a 28/3.5 Super takumar in M42 mount that I'll shoot, if there's any interest here I'll post the results

 

[Kim Coxon]

The 28/3.5 is a much better quality lens. The M28/2.8M, A and F were some of Pentax's worst lens very much built to a budget design.

Kim

 

[zuikologist]

Nice work. The 28mm F is not too bad as a standard lens but as Kim mentioned, the 28/3.5 is a a better lens.

 

[peterm1]

I don't know about the bayonet mount 28mm but I can vouch for the superb performance of the 28mm f3.5 in screw mount. Crisp and very contrasty

 

[Kim Coxon]

Some useful information on the relative merits of Pentax lenses here:
http://stans-photography.info/

Kim

 

[Rhoyle]

I think with just a little bit of PS tweaking, they could be quite good. I've got both an 28mm f2.8 M and A lenses. Not the very best that Pentax has produced, but quite useable.

 

[charjohncarter]

I have two Pentax DSLRs, and they do shots like those consistently. You will like that camera. I have used my 28mm f3.5 Super-Takumar M42 on my digitals with no problems. Someone said the 28mm M42 is a great lens, I'll second that, my 35mm underwater Nikkor f2.5 and the 28mm M42 are my favorite lens.

 

[anandi]

Thanks for the comments folks. I've put up some shots in the set referenced above with the 28/3.5 M42 SuperTak (my flickr photostream: http://www.flickr.com/photos/aanandi/) and the collected wisdom on this thread does mesh with the results of shooting with the 28/2.5 M42 lens. It's. really sharp, even wide open its good. I also dug up a 50/1.4 that a nice member here sent me a year ago (Thorir) and the apple shots make a good case to use this as a portrait lens.

The Stan's site is a good site, but of course gives me a bad case of GAS.

Cheers,
-Amit