example look fine, but i can't find any with what i would call a really thin dof - which is what makes me doubt it for portraits

hmm

whats the aperture?

2.8

oh, yeah

that wouldn't be that great for portraiture at that focal length

does pentax have a soft-focus lens?

my 50 does some fine portraits at 2.8, but its got that lil' longer focal length too

ya, it does

Canon has one, but its REALLY old

and its not as flexible as Nikon's

kmp.bdimitrov.de/lenses/primes/short-tele/FA85f2.8-Soft.html

soft focus lenses are going out of style because digital effects can get you like 95% there from what i've been reading

yeah

I've seen some of the digital effects...I don't like them much

its not just about creating the glow

in general, i'm not much of a soft focus fan - but it'd still be fun to play with

specular highlights have a certain aura and flare about them as well

true

and its ultimately a PLANE of focus thing

you can shift forward or backward

changing how much of your foreground or background is blurred

which is very hard to do with post processing

and usually when people try, its very obvious'

sure

I guess thats one of the detriments of digital

people look for digital solutions to everything

rather than using optics to solve the problems in a more ideal (and far less time consuming) way

caters to humanities laziness

ya

like i got the question on my black spot metering Q about "well why not just do it in post"

sigh

le sigh

Thats why on that underwater photography question, I recommended actual underwater filters, rather than post processing.

this is such a sweet deal when combined with in body IS...it so hard to not to do it...esp considering how well rated it is

amazon.com/Tamron-28-75mm-Aspherical-Digital-Cameras/dp/…

You could try to correct the MONSTER blue shift in post...but thats a really humongous shift, and algorithms break down in such extremes. Optical correction is so much better for that kind of thing.

wow

sweet, drill bits from China came in

SP XR ZL Di LD IF

:o

@rfusca nice

ya, alphabet soup

so what is this XR technology?

is that like canon's diffractive optics?

i don't know, its just another one of those "we have a special kind of glass" glass

@jrista just looks like it'd be a pretty decent lens

how does it feel?

have you tried it?

nope

havent

One of the things that keeps turning me off of third party lenses is usually their construction.

When I compare Tamron or Sigma lenses with Canon lenses in a store

ic

the Canon lenses always feel so much better from a build quality standpoint

well the sigma 50mm was really solid, nice smooth focus, but the sigma 70-300mm was a pos

only the cheapest Canon lenses (like the 18-55 kit) feel worse than the third-party competitors

yeah, I've heard good things about the sigma 50

and I know that the bigger sigma telephotos are also pretty damn good

ya

i think like anything, the bottom of the lens are just that - bottom

but tokina and tamron...I've never really felt like they offered anything over Canon except price...but it also always felt like you would definitely get what you paid for

I may be spoiled too though

I have several L-series lenses

and I have such a hard time even buying a canon gold lens these days

there's a couple of their lenses that I just keep hearing "they're crap, except for lens X and Y"

"their" lenses?

like that Tamron and the tamron 90mm macro

their being sigma or canon?

tokina and tamron

oh, right

and there's a tokina that @EvanKrall has that is supposed to be really nice

which one?

don't remember, its a wide angle zoom

i think its the 11-16mm f/2.8

@rfusca (re DA 40mm Limited) Yes, I sure do. And I use it 80-90% of the time. It is a sweet little lens.

I'm pretty sure it's the fastest AF of any pentax lens -- it's small and light, and designed for AF. So that's nice.

Bokeh is pretty good. It can get a little busy (tending a bit towards ringed edges), but mostly looks nice.

9 aperture blades helps.

@mattdm hows it do for just candid portraits ? got any sample pics to post?

I'd be interested in some sample pics too.

The older (and larger and more expensive) FA 43mm Limited is nicer for bokeh.

@rfusca yeah i'll find some later tonight

Take a look at

pentaxphotogallery.com/home#/…

@mattdm ya, i saw that

too. That's usually heavily post-processed though

did you see that you can select by lens? pretty nifty.

The other thing I'd be tempted by is the DA 35mm Macro Limited.

35mm is such a short distance to work macro with though

Mike Johnston raves about it photo.net/columns/mjohnston/pentax-35mm-lens/optical-discussion

not just for macro but as a normal lens.

The main downside over the 40mm (again, other than price and size) is that it'd be slower to focus.

got to go now. more later.

ok

i'd sure appreciate some samples later tonight from ya

will do.

@mattdm thanks

oh here's one by me quickly though:

pentaxphotogallery.com/home#/…

i'm considering trying to swing for the k-5 and just the 40mm

@mattdm that's EXACTLY what i was wanting to see

@rfusca Will that setup work for your astrophotography?

@jrista most of the shots i really like are either around the 50mm range or ALOT longer, my 300mm wasn't even really cutting it there. so i'm thinking get the 40mm now to cover that 50mm'ish range and then when i get the chance, pick up one of those cheap 500mm mirror lenses for galaxy and cluster work

gocha

I think I've used my 100-400mm more for moon shots than my wider angles

oh, for sure

I've used my 50/1.4 for a few milky way shots, but even with that aperture, I still usually have to use ISO 800 for a bright enough shot, but the detail is so poor.

thats a shame

yeah

the 450D is not a noise performer

800 on the d3100 was pretty clean

ya, thats for sure

I've been holding out over two years now

I REALLY want the 5DIII

lol

lol

indeed

I just hope it actually comes out this year

otherwise I'll probably break and get a 7D

then the 5D will come out within a week >.>

i'm hoping i can get a k-5 and then i wouldn't hesitate to do my astro work at 1600

and a stack of 5 minute exposures(or longer) at 1600 should be awesome for alot of stuff

@jrista ya, thats what will happen

@rfusca Oh hell yeah.

Hey, have you used DeepSkyStacker at all?

ya, thats my normal workflow program

have you used any of its alternative bayer interpolation modes?

nope

@jrista @JohnCavan said he preordered one of those pentax astrotrac gps things, so i'm hoping to get the skinny on it. I'd love to think it could work with an existing tracker to cancel out minor tracking errors for super long exposures

meh

I really hate framesets

deepskystacker.free.fr/english/userguide.htm#rawddp

The Bayer Drizzle in particular is interesting to me

i can't ever get the files to process with drizzle - it just hangs

deepskystacker.free.fr/english/technical.htm#Drizzle

@rfusca hmm

"When using the 3x Drizzle option, everything is multiplied by 9 (3 squared) and unless you have a very powerful machine and a lot of memory and disk space available you don't want to use this on classic DSLR images."

it sounds like it is a pretty intensive process

The main side effect is that the amount of memory and disk space necessary to create and process drizzled images is multiplied by the square of the Drizzle factor. Of course the time needed to create such images is also much longer.

maybe its not hung...just processing?

ya

thats what i was about to say

lol

well i left it overnight

oh

i think eventually it would error out too

like 4 or 5 hours in

I don't think it would take that long...yeah

but, my laptop's not particularly powerful

(esp this new one :()

i'll have to do my astro work on my media pc which is much more powerful)

yeah

I built a pretty beastly system to support the astrostacking

@jrista cool

so, do you have to use dark frames with that program?

my guy in the club is using a new process after the stacking where you process the color and luminance information seperately, then bring them together at the end...it seems to be working well, i was gonna get the details this weekend at the meeting. Called the "gendler" method i think?

@jrista don't have to, but you want to, dark frames are great

do you do one dark frame per light frame, or do you bundle several light frames?

you should do one for every light frame (after you shoot all your lights), but i usually pick an arbitrary (but high) number and do that.

hmm, so you shoot all the lights, then do the same number of dark frames in one set afterwards?

I guess I thought that to gain the benefit of a dark frame, you had to shoot the dark frame right after the light frame so that the noise patterns were as similar as possible

yup

shrug don't know, but everybody does it afterwards

if you tried to do it right after each frame, you'd take a long time to do your lights and stacking would be worse

alrighty, i got to head

@jrista ciao

later

@rfusca ...

That's a dress-up dress, not how we normally dress her. :)

This is all kind of random chosen from the photo album. :)

gtg crying kid. maybe more later