Camera ROOM?!!

This had better be good!

50mm lenses seem cheaper generally, I guess it is to do with their glass configuration. The 50mm macro is a great lightweight lens for landscape, macro lenses tend to be sharpest at smaller apertures than conventional lenses in order to give increased depth of field in close-ups.

I have a couple of V6IIs but It is worth noting that Cactus went out of business a couple of years ago, which is a shame.

If you attach the triggers to the camera and flash switch them on first and then the camera and flash after, that way they should be recognised. Obviously switch one to transmit and the other to receive; you can also use the sender as a trigger to test.

I discovered yesterday that the LR auto denoise is actually a function within its Enhance mode. This takes a heavily cropped image, for instance, and adds pixels so it looks ok as a large file. So the denoise is actually doing the same, creating a new raw file: a 48MB original becomes a 175MB file. I have tried Enhance a few times in the past but ended up rejecting the files as zoomed in they don’t look right. That’s probably just an issue for pixel-peepers but printing large will show the faults. My other denoise software, and Photoshop, exports tiff files when using Pentax raw files which are equally large.

Actually I am going to modify my view after giving the NR more of a test, this time I applied the sharpening first as well as the other processing and then tried the auto NR and it did a pretty good job. Pschute, for selective noise reduction I apply it to suit the main subject (if needed) and then select "background" to increase the NR where it is more obvious.

It is described as a game changer for LR but as it is an entirely automatic function I have little use for it. Sharpening and noise reduction work against each other in LR as in all software so both need adjusting in individual photos for optimum results, for that reason I go to ON1 NoNoise for higher ISO images which allows control of noise and sharpening like LR manual mode but with far better results. The best I have found for sharpening is Photoshop but the denoise function is poor (in my experience).

Auto Denoise in LR produces a separate file like when using other software so it doesn’t save much in time either.

Afficionados will claim that as film grain is random and digital noise arises from a regular pattern of pixels they can never be the same. Unless, now here is an idea, a clean image is overlaid on a random texture like sand in Photoshop.

Hopefully many will go to those using a Pentax for the first time and increase the demand for lenses.

I was recently given Salgado’s Amazonia photo book, an extraordinary endeavour shot entirely in black and white over many years. There are basically two categories, aerial shots of the vast landscape and portrait photos of tribes some visited by the outside world for the first time. I gather for the latter black and white was convenient because of the low light levels in many scenes; we miss the vibrant colours of adornments but the focus of interest is on the faces. For the aerial landscape shots though I think colour would have given a far stronger message with all those miles of vibrant green.

I see some websites calling for a mono version of the GRIII which would make a lot of sense as well but I get the logic of using a platform compromising size with high resolution.