An aperture ring-less DA lens will always be fully stopped down on an ME super though

An A lens should perform exactly like an M lens on any aperture setting except 'A'.

Well actually I shouldn't have listed that first - I would try and rule everything else out if you can first!

I did it for my Tamron 17-50 while sitting in a pub garden, because I noticed it was definitely focusing *behind* where it should, even on easy to focus on objects like the front of a house opposite me (trees behind were sharp, brickwork was out of focus). I did it for that lens only. I'm not really that much of a technical geek (honest!) so I just kept applying a little bit more compensation until I was happy that the bricks were sharp. I checked it against objects nearer to me as well. They were also correctly focussed.

No doubt there are better / more precise ways of doing it but life's too short IMHO

It would have been a brave photographer to have walked that close to them and shot them with a wide angle lens! I don't see that it matters that a remote buggy was used; it allowed the photographer to capture shots that would otherwise have been impossible.

1. Check your camera/lens for backfocussing and make the required adjustement.

2. Perhaps try dialing in some - exposure compensation and adapt your practise to a metering system which is less prone to underexpose than the K10D (I found it took a while to get out of habits I had got into with the K10D because of that camera's propensity to be fooled into underexposing by bright skies etc).

3. Try out the different image tone settings or adjust the one you have (+sharpening +contrast +saturation perhaps?) These settings are almost infinitely tweakable!

4. Shoot at native 16MP not 10MP otherwise you aren't getting the best detail out of the camera. I'm not sure, but perhaps the in-camera resizing is softening your images? Certainly you are ditching a lot of detail.


As I said I switched from a K10 to a K30 (similar to the K5) recently. For a while it took a while to get used to the K30's output. I tweaked about with the image tone settings and am now happy with it, and after using it for 'serious shooting', rather than 'test shots', much prefer it to the K10D.

All these cameras benefit from using some sort of post processing software to tweak the images, they do not produce the sort of oversharpened, oversaturated 'Facebook ready' shots you will get from most compacts. You certainly ought to resize your images and then sharpen them yourself, rather than let websites resize them for you.

Wow, amazing. Those are really up close and personal shots. I haven't seen anything quite like those before!

Between f2 and f1.7 the difference is subtle, but go to f1.4 and the difference is much more noticeable on, say, a portrait head shot.

You mean on the viewfinder view? Obviously it makes a difference to the DOF in the resulting image... albeit very slight from f1.7 to f2...

Suspect that owes more to the excellent Sigma 30mm than the Sony NEX camera behind it! Remember it's also cheap and easy to mount Pentax lenses to the NEX - much easier to focus with proper focus peaking!

That said, my NEX hasn't had much of a look in since starting to do 'photoshoots' (lol) - even with focus peaking manual focus via an LCD is not as good or quick as a reliable AF lens and framing your shots via an OVF. Fine if you're pottering about though.

I've basically been using the K30 and Tamron 17-50 - they make a reliable and useful pair.

Thankyou Algi! I have been well and truly schooled.

One question though - if kit really doesn't matter, why are you shooting with a K5 rather than an istDS from back in the day? Or for that matter, a manual SLR with just a 50mm?