Well, not any more. The things that Lightroom can do are really impressive, this was a first attempt….

The success rate for shots of the Moon is running at about 50%, the 200mm end of the Pentax zoom lens gives the best results in terms of contrast and sharpness. I have tried other lenses, and a 2X teleconverter but the sharpness suffers. I need to figure out how to post process images I think, although part of me calls that “cheating”.

Actually it’s just occurred to me that I haven’t tried my 100mm f2.8 with the 2X teleconverter. Must see how that does…

Anyway, I digress. The thing is that although the images look pretty good at screen or web resolutions, they’re fairly small crops from the full frame, which means that they’re not suitably high resolution for enlarging far beyond what you see here. The actual size of the moon through a 200mm lens is…

So, pretty distant. Luckily the Pentax K5 has a high resolution (16 Mega Pixel) sensor with, more importantly, a cracking image quality and low noise. This means that the raw image can be cropped and still manages to look like this…

So you can see a fair bit of detail, but you can’t really go in much closer than you see here without the image pixelating.

I headed away from the streetlights last night, it was a perfect, clear night resulting in some decent shots of the Moon, like the one above. But the reason for freezing my nuts off in rural Bradfield parish was to see if it was possible to set my sights further afield than our Moon.

Exciting, isn’t it ?? That’s Jupiter through a 200mm lens. I know, I know, you’ll have to take my word for it. I don’t think anyone else I have shown this picture to has shared my excitement. I mean that’s ANOTHER PLANET for fecks sake

Pleased as I was with that, there should be more to see. I mean if Gallileo could see 4 moons round Jupiter in 1610 then surely I could at least match that. In order to get any detail at all (well, if not detail then at least colour) in that shot of Jupiter I had to set the exposure accordingly, but the Galilean moons would be much fainter than the gas giant they orbit. A longer exposure and an upping of the camera’s sensitivity was required. I knew this would overexpose the planet, but would it pick up the faint light reflecting off the moons ?

Yes, yes it would.

Now as I still have no idea how to work image manipulation software, this is the photo as it came out of the camera (cropped down a lot, obviously). Jupiter has overexposed and gone supernova but the 4 moons are all there.

*speechless face*

When I saw this I had to check that those actually were the Jovian Moons, couldn’t quite believe that a 200mm lens could pick out that sort of detail that far away. Now I know it’s nothing compared to what a small telescope (or a better / longer lens) could manage but the most important thing about that photo of Jupiter, Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto is that I took it, me, myself. I mean those are moons orbiting another planet.  On a techie note, that photo was taken on a manual exposure of 1 second, f5.6 at 800 ISO.

Click the image for a larger version

Now the Pentax K5′s low noise at high sensitivity is the best you can get in its class, so I upped the ISO to 3200 and the shutter speed up to 5 seconds for this image.

The quality isn’t great. I’m not sure if this is down to the Moons moving during the 5 second exposure or (more likely) camera shake coming into the equation. The longer exposure and higher ISO has brought out some more points of light though, I assume that these are stars in the background.

The plan was to take another photo tonight on the same settings and see what’s moved on the assumption that anything that has is another moon. Unfortunately thick cloud has put paid to that idea

Well, if you want a quick executive summary.. for most practical applications it’s not particularly brilliant. Oh all the stuff about the build quality being high is certainly true, it’s a solidly made piece of kit and it certainly looks impressive but that’s about it.

I bought the lens because I’m getting quite into astrophotography. Now as this is probably just a passing fad I didn’t want to go overboard on buying stuff but the oft stated limitations of this lens (fiddly focus and needing a tripod) shouldn’t really be an issue with something as slow moving as the Moon.

You’d think.

The problem is that even on a solid tripod with very careful focusing, the image quality is poor. Nothing is ever quite sharp and the colours are washed out, to the point where moon photos look black and white with crap contrast.

Here’s the Moon through a 200mm lens, image cropped to this size obvs, but no other pissing about done with it…

200mm Pentax 50-200mm Lens

A pretty good photo, well so I think. Next up we have the same lens with a £10 Vivitar 2X teleconverter from eBay…

Pentax 50 - 200mm + Vivitar 2X TC

So although the focal length is doubled, the Teleconverter does rob the photo of some of it’s sharpness. Still pretty good but not quite as sharp as without the TC (although I’m sure a better Teleconverter would give much better results, as would knowing how to work Photoshop).

Finally we have the Sigma 600mm Mirror Lens

Sigma 600mm F8 Mirror Lens

First of all, check out what’s happened to the colours. Ans what’s with that hazy colour fringing round the edge ??

Again bear in mind apart from cropping there has been no post processing on this image at all. I’m sure you could sharpen it up and enhance it in Photoshop, but where’s the fun in that.

So, as an astrophotography lens for snapping the moon, you’re better off with the 200mm. I did give the Sigma a chance to redeem itself on something further away (Jupiter) but again it was no better than the kit zoom.

So, the Sigma was a waste of money, but at least it wasn’t a lot of money . If you want to get anything like a decent shot out of it you need plenty of light, and ideally a target that isn’t moving. The focusing on the lens takes some getting used to, not helped by the fact that (on my setup at least) the lens will focus well past infinity.

In bright light the results are better.There’s a nice posh house that overlooks the village where I live, and through a 50mm lens it looks like this…

50mm

Zoom in to 200mm and it looks slightly more impressive…

200mm

OK, maybe not. Before sticking it on a shelf and forgetting about it for ever, I gave the 600mm lens another try, if it can’t get a result in this light it never will…

600mm Mirror

Actually, that’s not bad. On the original you can make out the name of the house, written above the door…

600mm Mirror

Ok, I take it all back, that’s bloody impressive.

So the light has to be perfect and the target not moving but that’s an amazing result, well I think so anyway.

Wonder what it looks like if I put a £10 2X Teleconverter on a £100 600mm Mirror….

600mm Mirror and Vivitar 2X TC

The image quality may not be great, but that’s a house f’kin miles away. The Teleconverter seems to have less of an impact on the image quality in bright light too.

600mm Mirror and Vivitar 2X TC

And here’s the name above the door (you can see it in the 1200mm photo above). It’s lost quite a bit compared to the 600mm lens on its own but it’s still almost legible, and again a better teleconverter may yield better results.

So there you have it, a totally unscientific opinion on the 600mm lens. OK, so you can get a decent(ish) photo out of it if the conditions are exactly right but in most cases it’s no better than a 200mm, or even a 200mm with a cheap teleconverter. Maybe I just got a bad ‘un, I’ve seen some decent results from this lens, but you never know how much pissing about in Photoshop has gone on.

Pentax 50 - 200mm + Vivitar 2X TC

Addition :- Oh, and in the interests of completeness I tried the same shot with the 200mm and 2X Teleconverter. Here’s the unscaled photo, judge for yourself.

It does have a certain novelty appeal I suppose but I can’t imagine it’ll ever get much use. Maybe I’ll get a 5X eyepiece and use it as a telescope.

Oh, and start saving up for the Sigma 50-500 zoom

Addition (again) :- Ok, there is a chance I was being a little unkind. I asked a question on the PentaxForums.com website about the focusing past infinity problem and very quickly got an answer back on how to resolve the issue (the lens has been taken apart at some time in the past and put back together by an idiot).

So following the instructions I took it apart (probably the second idiot to do so) and sorted the focusing issue (through trial and error). And the end result was this…

600mm Mirror Before sorting focus

600mm Mirror After sorting focus

So, hopefully we’ll get a cloud free night tonight to give the moon another, erm, shot, although I’m still not holding out much hope for its low light abilities, especially based on this from just now…

50-200mm Zoom

600mm Mirror

eBay has a lot to answer for. Well that and Photographers giving good advice. A couple of the people I have spoken to about photography, specifically gig photography, have recommended that a fast standard lens is a useful addition to any camera bag.

Virtually any manual focus Pentax bayonet fit lens will fit on the K5, and there are a bewildering range available which made doing a lot of research worthwhile. Very basically they fall into two different types. One has the ability to set the aperture manually (A series) and one doesn’t (M series). Now as I wanted the least amount of faffing about, it had to be an A series lens.

Why not go for a new AF 50mm lens?, I hear you ask. Well, because they’re the best part of £300 for a fast one, that’s why.

So with that decision made, it was time to investigate what was available. In general with camera lenses the “faster” it is (wider aperture, lower f number) the more expensive and this proved to be true of the second hand ones on eBay. I wanted a “proper” Pentax lens , so basically there are three versions available..

50mm F1.4 = £150

50mm F1.7 = £60-£90

50mm F2.0 = £25

Now give the superior low light performance of the Pentax I didn’t see the need to go for the F1.4, so the F1.7 was the best price/performance balance.

As an aside, there is an F1.2 lens too, I only saw one and it was an M series… and it was £300. With that I’d imagine you could take photos down a coal mine. At night.

As with anything else on eBay the secret is to be patient, and to set a price and not go over it. This proved particularly true in this case as I missed out on three (which went for between £66 and £87 !!!). My top bid was £60 and I know that in the past they had occasionally gone for less than that (one went for £35). In the end I won the one in the photo for £55, with a Hoya filter which is worth a couple of quid at eBay prices.

My other buys this week have been Skylight filters for the two lenses that came with the camera. These don’t do much effect wise (brighten things up a bit) but they do protect the front element of the lens.

Oh, and one more thing…

I bought this…

If you saw my previous blog you’ll know that I’ve been giving astrophotography a go. Now long telephoto lenses can be stupidly expensive, and I’ve spent quite enough on this passing fad already, but I did spot a 600mm Sigma Mirror lens on eBay.

Catadioptric (mirror) lenses were all the rage back in the 80s but have recently become desperately unfashionable for a variety of reasons. Reading up the Sigma got some half decent reviews with a couple of major caveats, namely that they were difficult to hand hold, and it’s fiddly to manually focus. This may be an issue for sports photographers, birders and suchlike but A) the Moon isn’t known for moving particularly quickly and B) I’ll be using a tripod so these limitations won’t matter.

Oh, and when you consider that a 600mm telephoto refractive lens is difficult to find for under a grand whereas the mirror lens cost me £117 the economics make sense for the odd photo of the heavens.

Last week I noticed the hashtag #BBCStargazing popping up in my Twitter (@Dizzydalek, if you care) timeline. Now for me Astronomy is one of those background interests, you know the sort of thing, the eternal half arsed “ohh, I’d like to give that a go” interest that you never actually get round to investigating.

The twitter chatter started to include some images that people had been taking of the night sky and the (then) active Aurora. So armed with a half arsed knowledge about long exposures and suchlike I headed out into the garden to give it a go.

And the results were pretty immediate…

The longest manual timed exposure time you can set on the Pentax K5 is 30 seconds, so that was the starting point. Starting off with the 200mm lens at it’s longest reach I pointed it in the general direction of “up” and pressed the shutter button.

You know when your own ignorance surprises you ? Well looking at the first 30 second exposures there was clearly something amiss, all the stars were lines and not dots. Was the camera moving during the exposure? Was the wind shaking the tripod? So I made sure the camera was tight on the tripod, and the tripod wasn’t moving and tried again. Same results.

Turns out, apparently, that the earth is spinning, and the stars aren’t. Who’d have thunk ?? I mean I knew they moved (relatively) but I never knew they moved that quickly. Do a quick google search and you can see some awesome images of 360 degree star trails which look impressive.

The other thing that amazed me was just how many stars you could see on the photos compared to what you could see with the naked eye.

The long exposure showed up some impressive detail (even with a 200mm lens in a back garden in Yorkshire). This image is of Orion’s “sword” and the big bright splodge is, apparently, the Orion Nebula.

You can also see how much the stars have actually moved during the exposure time, and how much the orange light pollution from streetlights effect the image, even away from the big city.

OK, it may not look like much but it was a first attempt, and it was more than enough to fire up a spark of enthusiasm. And to make me wish I lives somewhere less cloudy

As a complete noob, apart from the main constellations, I don’t know my way around the night sky at all. This is where a search of the Apple App Store turned up Night Sky for the iPad. This is an amazing little app which uses the inbuilt compass and accelerometer to check which way you’re holding the device and displays the relevant map for you. It’s difficult to describe, if you hold it up to the night sky the image on the screen shows you the stars and planets in the part of the heavens the iPad (or iPhone) has its back to.

That made no sense. Go download it and see for yourself…

The next night I decided to have a go at photographing the moon, not holding out much hope for seeing much through the 200mm lens. Even at full zoom it was little more than a small-ish crescent…

I’d like to say that was my first attempt, but to be honest I took dozens of photos with different exposure and ISO settings. It all seemed a bit hit and miss if I’m honest but the joy of Digital cameras is that you’re not wasting film

The thing that threw me was that the Moon is actually a lot brighter than you think. Whereas stars need an exposure of at least 10 seconds, this shot of the moon was taken at 1/80th of a second.

One of the reasons I picked the Pentax over the competition was because of its low light operation, and it was that combined with its decent 16 mega pixel sensor which allowed me to enlarge the picture above to this…

Now bear in mind all I have done is cropped the original, no other post processing at all. I was gobsmacked, this wasn’t an image taken through a telescope or some ridiculously long lens, this was a decent spec DSLR with the lens that came with it…

You can almost see the Clangers.

The Pentax K5 (like most other SLR cameras I’d imagine) does have an idiot setting. Turn the selector switch to the little green square and it sets auto-everything, to the point that if you press the shutter and the camera’s not happy with life it’ll point blank refuse to take the photo….

The first venture outdoors was into Oughtibridge Woods with my more-or-less willing model Grendel the Labradoodle. I got to use the camera, he got to run about, everyone wins.

And we found out exactly how good the photos on “idiot mode” could be. I mean it was much more luck (and the camera’s intelligence) than judgement, but this is one of the first shots I took..

I mean, how the hell am I EVER going to top that ???

The Spring time woods are a happy hunting ground for the trainee photographer, it’s unfortunate that the more you read about composition, exposure and light quality the more difficult it becomes to get the final image to match themasterpiece you see in your mind.

Ahhh, for the days when just being in focus was enough

The other bugger is that the quick snapshots often come out better than the photos that I spend time composing. Here we see the fearless Squirrel hunter getting ready to launch himself after something or other. Now experts may have another opinion (and if you do, keep it to yourself) but I really like the pattern of the tree trunks and the way they’re lit from one side.

Out and about there are loads of things that I look at and think “ooohh, that’d be a good photo” only for the final shot to be a bit, well, crap. A frost covered field is a white blob, a solitary tree is a splodge on the white blob, and so on.

The frosty morning did give me a chance to put some of the depth of field theory into practice using the 100mm macro lens.

This little plant shoot was only about an inch long and I took loads of photos of it, experimenting with different settings, to see how the changes effected the final photo.

Lots of really crap shots resulted. And it was chuffing cold on the knees.

The nice forestry people had left some nice photogenic piles of logs lying about too. Well I’m sure they must be photogenic, not that I could make them look like anything other than, well, a pile of logs.

At least it’s a digital camera, so the hundreds of photos I took didn’t cost me anything It was interesting, finally, to begin to get some sort of nascent eye for the composition. This was made easier by the fact the logs weren’t going anywhere. All of the books talk about patterns being a good thing, circles are a pattern, right ??

After photographing the logs from one side, which was in shadow, viewing them from the other side showed things in *ahem* a whole new light, as you can see from this macro shot.

Anyway, I’m not too bothered about the composition and lighting yet. I’m just settling for things being in focus…

Ahh, but “what about asking the ‘togs you work with at CackBlabbath ?” you may ask. Well therein lies a problem, namely that those guys are seriously talented photographers who could get decent results with pretty much any camera. Well, that and they use some seriously top end kit. Anyway the Nikon users are zealous about their Nikons, and the Canon guys are just as evangelical about their Canons.

The first decision I had to make was the budget. DSLRs range from £300 to £lots, not including the lenses. And it’s the lenses, more than the camera body, that dictates the quality of the final output. As I was intending getting serious about photography I wanted to get something decent.

But seriously, good lenses are stupidly f’kin expensive.

Right, so first let’s look at my criteria…

1) Good low light performance : One of the main uses for the camera will be taking photos at gigs. This means low noise at high ISO is a must, as is high sensitivity.

2)Weather Protected : Outdoor gigs can be wet, and muddy. Some degree of waterproof-ness is required.

3)Movie Mode : I shoot videos at gigs which get published on the CackBlabbath YouTube page. The different Fiji Finepix cameras I have had have all managed this pretty well.

4)External Mic Input : So I can video record band interviews with better sound quality than the on-camera mic can typically manage.

5)Low Shutter Lag : I was pretty pissed off missing photos because the camera took a second to think about things after I pressed the shutter.

6)Be from a Camera manufacturer : By that I mean a company with camera pedigree, as opposed to an electronics company who also make cameras.

A Google search turned up the really rather excellent snapsort.com, a site which has loads of camera comparisons. Needing somewhere to start I decided that the baseline would be the Nikon D7000. A great SLR that came highly recommended.

Looking at the specification it ticked all the boxes, but it was at the absolute top end of what I was prepared to pay while the next one down the range, the D5100 didn’t offer all the features I wanted.

So, that was the starting point. The first comparison to the equivalent Canon, the EOS 60D. And that’s another thing, comparisons between different manufacturers camera ranges, and even models from the same manufacturers range, is a bit tricky.

The EOS60D gets mixed reviews. On the Snapsort comparison it is comprehensively beaten by the D7000. OK it’s a bit cheaper but the image quality, dynamic range and sensitivity are all inferior. There are a number of sites which compare these two, and they pretty much all come down on the side of the Nikon.

Oh, and the the Canon isn’t weather protected either, but it does have a flip out LCD though, YAY !!!!

There is a third contender though, one that I first read about in a three way comparison with the Nikon and Canon. The Pentax K5 got some cracking reviews and, like the D7000, ticked all of the requisite boxes.

The first thing you notice looking at photos of the Pentax is that it, to me, looks more like a “traditional” SLR, not as curvey. The Snapsort comparison of the Pentax and the Nikon was much closer than with the Canon, with the Pentax scoring additional points with me for its image stabilisation and lower shutter lag (both of which could be useful considering a business idea I was working on).

It was a good bit cheaper too.

So the competition had come down to the Nikon D7000 Vs the Pentax K5. Now this is not a decision you can make based on internet reviews, you have to get hands-on with the gear and see what feels right to you. Jessops in Manchester had both in stock so I drove across to have a play with them.

Hands on there was no comparison, in the end it was that easy. The Nikon just didn’t feel right whereas the Pentax felt much better and seemed more balanced and the controls seemed a bit more intelligently laid out.

It was weird after weeks of Internet comparisons that it only took about 10 minutes to make my mind up once I got my hands on both cameras. I bought the Pentax in a kit with two lenses, one was an 18-55mm and the other was a 50-200mm. Given the investment in the camera I also bought a LowePro camera backpack to keep it in. The Fastpack 200, if you’re interested.

When I bought the camera I also wanted to get a battery grip as I never like being reliant on a bespoke rechargeable battery as power to charge it up isn’t easy to find in the middle of a field. The battery grip lets you use 6 AA batteries to power the camera.

Rather than the £200 official one I got a Meike knock-off copy on eBay for £38. Although it’s not made anything like as well as the Pentax one (which has a metal chassis and is weatherproof) I can live with that fact given the much lower price. It certainly doesn’t look too out of place fitted to the camera.

Well, it looks fine to me

I have recently decided to get more serious about Photography. Now I’ve been taking photos for the best part of 30 years, starting off waay back in the dark and distant past with one of these, a Zenith TTL. About as Manual a camera as you can get, although it did at least have TTL metering.

Unfortunately, being young and inquisitive, I decided to find out how it worked, so I very carefully took it apart…

That’ll be that one buggered then. Wasn’t cheap to get it fixed either…

The Zenith was a solid beast of a camera, from a time when Eastern Europe ruled the budget SLR market, While people with rich parents had an Olympus OM10, or even the holy grail of a Canon AE1P us peasants made do with our Zeniths and Prakticas and developed and printed the photos in the school darkroom. Them were the days…

When I got a job, it was time for a new camera. As the Olympus and Canon were still way out of reach I graduated to the new fangled Automatic Exposure Prakticas. In my case this was the B100 (and I’ve still got it). This was a brilliant little thing, small and light and although still just a comparatively cheap camera, it was a massive step up from the Zenith.

Back when I used to visit Egypt regularly I took loads of photos, many of which ended up on the Akhet website.

The little Praktica served me well over there, back in the days when you could get the chemist who developed (ask your parents) the film (ask your parents) to put the piccies onto something called a PhotoCD. Still got a couple of them that have survived the passing aeons, like that one of Philae temple…

Fast forward *cough* a number of years and a number of digital cameras of varying types.  I think the first one was a Kodak, Thanks to the wonders of metadata I know it was a DC240.

The DC240 was a great little camera, for it’s time, and it got well used as the Akhet site developed. After that there was a Sony thing that I bought with a “consolidate your debts” loan….

A) That wasn’t very bright and

B) It wasn’t as good as the Kodak

When I started CackBlabbath I used a digital compact to take the photos for the site. Soon realising the limitations of this I graduated to a Fuji Finepix bridge camera, but that was not without it’s limitations either. Having said that I got some cracking photos out of them, many of which you can see over at CB. In fact to date I have had three different models of FinePix, and they’ve kept CackBlabbath in photos.

This is my favourite though….

OK, I know the quality isn’t great, but it captures the moment perfectly. Isn’t that what photography is supposed to be about ?

Well, yeah, I guess. Actually, as the inspiration to get a proper DSLR, that one turned out to be the most expensive photo I ever took.