New Lenses

Well, new to us anyway. Today was a very pleasant trip around the South Lakes and we were testing our new lenses out.

Sue had the SMC Pentax-DA 18-250mm out for the first time. She bought this to avoid the need to constantly change lenses. She always had the wrong lens on the camera. We were very impressed with its qualities. It is sharp and has good resokution as well. The texture of stone was reproduced very nicely indeed. It was less good at telephoto shots in poor light because of the restrictions of the f6.3 aperture, but within its limitations it's an excellent lens.

She also had the SMC Pentax D-FA 100mm f2.8 Macro and that was brilliant. Much more compact than her FA lens and really nice overall quality. A reduction in weight was one of the goals for Sue and these two lenses will fulfill most of her requirements.

I was trying the SMC Pentax-DA 55-300mm and was also impressed with this. Focusing on moving subjects at the longer end was difficult with AF so I reverted to manual focusing for some of the time. Closer shots were great and really close crops worked especially well. Excellent colour and sharpness and very pleasing bokeh.

All in all we were pleased with the day and with the results. Sue has posted her first picture on EPZ which is one of a very fascinated monkey peering into the 55-300mm lens. If you want to check it out her ID is sueriley

http://www.ephotozine.com/u25748/gallery/1002733

Curious as to what sort of subjects, John?

We were in an aviary at one point and the birds were everywhere and anywhere whilst we were amongst them. In these circumstances I found that manual focusing and old-fashioned anticipation and timing were the way to go. AF was way too slow and I suspect would have been with any camera. It wasn't specifically the lens that made me switch to MF.

John,

Congrats to Sue for a splendid shot.

Another good case for lens hoods.

And an excellent example of team photography. John you're obviously good bait!

John,

I'm curious. Your wife's shot of the monkey + lens looks like it could have been staged in a studio. Excellent lighting. Was the background added in PP?

It was shot at an animal sanctuary by available light. It's just that this particular shot had a deep shadow in the background and she's chosen a levels setting that renders it almost black.

You can go through a double door access (an airlock in effect) to walk amongst the monkeys and we noticed that they were very interested in my 55-300mm lens. All we did was put the lens close to a monkey or two and they tended to grab hold of it to have a closer look at the reflections in the front element. Sue took advantage of that and she got all the shots!

It just goes to show that these days we don't believe the shots we are looking at, but in this case it's as straight as a shot can get.

Not surprising then that it's commonly believed that humans descend from apes. Some at least have good taste .