Thanks again - much appreciated. Frogfish - these shots were all taken at a Falconry centre in the UK where I had gone with a Wildlife photographer (Chris Weston) on a 'photo day' (highly recommended BTW). There were a load of beautiful birds there and kindly some were in more 'natural' surroundings than simply on perches (hence the owls in trees etc.). I'd like to go back again actually and try some more shots. I also had a go at getting some pics of the birds in flight but the results were not good...

Cheers

I am never sure whether you can get a good idea of a lens performance by posting pics here on the forum, but here are a couple nonetheless to show the versatility of the lens... all taken with the DA21 on K7 over the last couple of years

Landscape-type shot...



Closer up shot... this with the lens wider open at f5.6 (but not wide open)



Even closer still...



And one from a walk down the river on a lazy saturday...



Don't know if that helps. Hope so

Regards

I love my DA21. I think it shines and I especially like it because it is so compact, so often I'll bung it on the camera and then stuff the camera in my backpack amongst everything else without too much trouble. It focusses close, and as a focal length it is often 'just right to my eye', although that is a matter of personal taste I guess. On the negative side, it is not the 'fastest lens', although that doesn't worry me particularly, and in any case I tend to find it works best stopped down from wide open. In good light I think it is fantastic. It also exhibits some distortion (barrel or pincushion, I can never remember which is which) but if I need to I can fix this easily using PSE. I would recommend it highly... but then I would say the same about all the limited primes

Regards

These are really very good Alan - and such a photogenic subject! I had promised myself I would not give in to LBA and save my pennies until the DA560 comes out, but your pics are really tempting me to get one of these sigmas...

Regards

Thanks for the kind comments everyone

Cheers

Top set - good to see some of the more 'vintage' cars still razzing around. I like the PP too.

Regards

I like these, and agree with DoctorJeff that the last one is the peach - a great pose!

Regards

Hello all. Last week I posted some pics I had taken a few years back with my old K10d of various big and small cats, processed into black and white. I really enjoyed going back through them and re-processing so I thought I would do a few more... This time it's birds, again all taken with the Sigma 70-300 on K10d. Some of these were taken at ISO1600 and the passage of time has meant much better noise reduction software, and converting to B/W has also done away with the worst of the bright noise pixels, which is very pleasing as I had regarded some of these shots as too noisy previously.

First up, a few of a Tawny Owl




I like this one because he looks a bit 'huffty'




Giving a good stare




And he's off!




I think this is an Eagle Owl




Here's a Barn Owl in a nook...




A Harris Hawk with a beady eye




and finally a diddy Scops Owl in a tree




Hope you like these. As ever any C&C welcome. There are a few more on my flickr stream but I have managed to get out now again with my K5 so I have some more recent pics to occupy myself with now

Regards

Some beauties there - I especially like the small copper as it has such an out-of-focus background. Lovely colours too. Nice one!

Regards

I have a number of Pentax lenses with SDM... the 16-50; 50-135; 200 and 300. They are all beautiful lenses and I have not had an SDM failure yet (and they do get a decent amount of use). The only odd occasion where there has been any issue has been an issue with contacts rather than the SDM per se. From memory this has occurred twice in about 3 years and has been a ten second fix (cleaning the contacts) in each case.

Although this is just my experience. No system will have 100% reliability, and I am sure that those who are disappointed are much more likely to post on forums like this than (probably the vast majority) who are satisfied... (?)

Cheers