Segovia balloon festival 2021 with the K 28mm f/2.0 "Hollywood"

The Segovia balloon festival started in 2018 when it was relatively small. The following year it got bigger but it always runs from Friday to Sunday and I went on holiday on the Saturday so could only attend the Friday early morning flight, which was fantastic. I understand that the following day there were far more balloons. In 2020 it was cancelled, for obvious reasons, and this year it's back. Again, my bad luck had me go on holiday early on Saturday so I missed the busier days again, but I got there at 7am sharp on the Friday to see these glorious things take off in the gorgeous morning light.

I've still to go through and upload many of the pictures (and develop and scan the film ones) but I took the K 28mm f/2.0 along to see how it performed and I have to say I was struck by how well it did - absolutely nothing to envy over more modern lenses.

The DA 16-85mm remains the best overall lens for this type of event but I love to use a high quality manual lens and there hasn't been much more than the mundane (and my kids) to photograph for the last eighteen months so it seemed like a good opportunity to test it on something other than shallow DOF shots wide open.


2021-07-23_04-56-59 by Jonathan MacDonald, on Flickr


2021-07-23_04-55-50 by Jonathan MacDonald, on Flickr


2021-07-23_04-49-38 by Jonathan MacDonald, on Flickr


2021-07-23_04-57-51 by Jonathan MacDonald, on Flickr


2021-07-23_04-50-53 by Jonathan MacDonald, on Flickr


2021-07-23_04-52-05 by Jonathan MacDonald, on Flickr


2021-07-23_04-53-33 by Jonathan MacDonald, on Flickr


2021-07-23_04-48-26 by Jonathan MacDonald, on Flickr


2021-07-23_04-43-13 by Jonathan MacDonald, on Flickr


2021-07-23_04-46-47 by Jonathan MacDonald, on Flickr


2021-07-23_04-44-17 by Jonathan MacDonald, on Flickr


Fields of balloons by Jonathan MacDonald, on Flickr

---

Pentax hybrid user - Digital K3 & K200D, film 645 and 35mm SLR and Pentax (&other) lenses adapted to Fuji X digital
Fan of DA limited and old manual lenses

Excellent shots...colourful and something we don't see much of on this site.

Only thing I have noticed...it may be me or my monitor...all the skies are full of digital artifacts running in bands. I've noticed this in lots of sky shots from many different contributors on all photo sites ..BUT only in the past few months...what is going on? Used to get the odd case but not as regular as now it seems.

Or is it just me?

Very nice set. My favourites are no 4, 6 and the last image.

Thank you for sharing!

---

Bjørn

PPG
Flickr

I don't see them. Perhaps there's some kind of compression going on with the images on the connection you're using?

---

Pentax hybrid user - Digital K3 & K200D, film 645 and 35mm SLR and Pentax (&other) lenses adapted to Fuji X digital
Fan of DA limited and old manual lenses

Hi Jonathan...yep, it seems like it is something to do with that. I've just roped my son in...on his desktop the images are fine...no banding...he's using Firefox browser most of the time...Google some of the time.

I'm using exclusively Opera and we just tried my machine browsing with Internet Explorer and it is bad on that as well. We are both using the same WiFi connection...so it must be down to browser compression.
Very annoying when using for photo work. Might have to change browsers.

As i've only really started noticing it within the past few months i'm wondering whether it is caused by more people being online during the current situation causing browser people to use a higher compression?

Anyway, pleased in a way to have tackled this and got some sort of an answer.

Your pics look even better without the banding.

regards

Karlo

Everyone has their favourite browsers, but I would suggest Firefox. It was one of the first to introduce colour management into browsers.

The second problem unfortunately is that I dont think colour management is being applied correctly on Jonathon's pictures. If I download an image from this site, it shows as having no colour profile applied. I cannot download the originals from Jonathon's Flickr page as it is disabled.

I think this is maybe where the problem is. Any image published on the web should have a colour profile tag applied....sRGB. Either Jonathon or this site is stripping those tags.

---

Peter



My Flickr page

Thanks for that info Peter...can't say i'm au fait with the whole 'colour profiling on a web browser' thing, but what you wrote sounded interesting. The 'banding' and 'jagglies' only seem to be present on large expanses of blue sky...have seen them on main ephotozine site as well...but...my son doesn't get them using Firefox.

I might try Firefox and see how it compares with Opera for general browsing which i've been using for over 10 years.

Anyway...have learnt something today.

regards

Karlo

No colour problems here. Philips LCD calibrated monitor, Sky fibre optic broadband and Firefox.
Great pictures - particularly those looking straight up.

---

Both the *istDS and the K5 are incurably addicted to old glass

My page on Photocrowd - link

I believe my K3 is set to use the sRGB colour profile and all of these images are SOOC jpegs.

---

Pentax hybrid user - Digital K3 & K200D, film 645 and 35mm SLR and Pentax (&other) lenses adapted to Fuji X digital
Fan of DA limited and old manual lenses