A walk to the sea.

I was unable to get to the Pentax User's meet this weekend due to a mountain of niffnaff and trivia, but by 4 o'clock this afternoon, I had sorted all I could so K20, The kit lenses and I took a walk to the sea (about a mile from home).

Found a Dragon on an apex (DA 55-300 1/320 at 300mm F9 ISO100)

[IMG]http://i217.photobucket.com/albums/cc222/Oggy3323/Dragon.jpg[/IMG]

A yellow house (DA 18-55 at 18mm 1/60 ISO 100 F16)

[IMG]http://i217.photobucket.com/albums/cc222/Oggy3323/YellowHouse.jpg[/IMG]

A blue house (DA 18-55 at 18mm 1/60 ISO 100 F7.1)

[IMG]http://i217.photobucket.com/albums/cc222/Oggy3323/Bluehouse.jpg[/IMG]

and my bank, which is now a trendy wine bar (DA 18-55 at 55mm 1/40 ISO 100 F22)

[IMG]http://i217.photobucket.com/albums/cc222/Oggy3323/Clockhouse1.jpg[/IMG]

Any thoughts appreciated.

Thanks for looking.

Oggy quite an interesting place and also disturbing what they can do to make their building ugly, the yellow house

Could you please upload them another way because they don't have ant EXIF data so it's hard to tell what you did. The dargon is a bit blurry probable because you used a long focal length and da to long shuttertime but we don't know for sure now.

Collecting 'colour' houses looks quite interesting The blue one is a bit spoiled by the fence though, so maybe try redoing once the fence is removed (hmmm, actually it may be an interesting project - colour houses). And maybe it's just me, but the first (the dragon) and the last one (the wine bar) they look a bit out of focus?

The originals were reasonably sharp, but looking at them as posted (having been cropped as appropriate, reduced to 800 pixels wide with my ancient copy of Paintshop Pro which doesn't save EXIF data and posted on photobucket), I have to say I am rather disappointed. Will add relevant data to original post.

Too bad to hear that Oggy, your camera settings looks fine so the picture should have been reasonable sharp.

Hi Oggy,

I too have the 55-300mm. Shooting at 300mm I have found realistically you need 1/500th shutter speed for 100% crops to be sharp and the higher the f/stop up to f/11 the better.

For the Red Dragon I would have upped the ISO to 200 and shared it out 2/3rd's to shutter speed and 1/3rd to aperture. This should give you (if my maths works out right) 1/500th, f/10, ISO 200. You could also try ISO 400 and f/14.

For Yellow, Blue and Wine bar I would have used ISO 200 and given myself more shutter speed/aperture. The Bar shutter speed is to low really at 1/40th and the extra speed the ISO change to 200 would give you the 1/80th you should ideally have used.

There again this is only my humble opinion, hope you don't mind.

Rgds,
Ian.

They look a bit soft Oggy and they shouldn't be. Just wondering if it's a problem with the reduction via Paintshop Pro. I find even Photoshop does not do very good reductions. (EDIT: just tried bicubic sharper setting and it's the same as my screen grabs so no problem with PS) I use an ancient ACDSee viewer (v3.1) and there is a big difference in what I see between the original and any reduction (EDIT: using PS default setting). In fact the best way for me seems to be to set the monitor to 800 wide and do a screen grab via the print screen key with the display set to full screen in ACDSee.

Perhaps if you could upload the original jpeg of the Clockhouse somewhere we could have a look and see if the problem is with Paintshop Pro. There shouldn't be because because the same people produced Jasc Image Robot which I've used for years for doing bulk reductions.

A simple upload site is link

shim

This is a small crop using Pentax Photolab.

[IMG]http://i217.photobucket.com/albums/cc222/Oggy3323/Clockhousecrop.jpg[/IMG]

Looks as if PSP (version 5) isn't doing me any favours.

It just looks a bit out of focus to me, or it could be that the lens isn't as sharp once stopped right down to f/22. The blue house looks fine, but this one definitely looks soft, so I don't think it's the software.

Dan

Looks better, but still not very sharp which could be, as Daniel said due to the lens being at f/22.

There are a few freeware programs you could try such as XnView, Ifranview or PhotoFiltre LINK

shim