Becoming a Pentaxian and Why I Love My New Camera

      As someone who had been interested in Photography for a long time, around a year ago I decided to focus on learning more and improving my skills. As far as buying cameras goes, my research and choices were pretty ill informed...
      I started out with an Olympus E-500 twin lens kit which just happened to be on a good offer at the time when my parents treated me around GCSE time. We were taking a trip to africa to go on safari and they wanted me to get some good photos. This camera lasted me for 5 years, it was pretty abysmal in anything resembling low light but otherwise gave some great colourful images. I managed to extend its life and usage using it with OM film lenses and an £11 adapter from Ebay. 

      At the start of my final year at uni I was asked to photograph my cousin's wedding, in hindsight I should have upgraded before the wedding, but I decided to put the money gained from that towards upgrading after the event! At that time I hadn't paid much attention to any of the new cameras around. After being completely overwhelmed I figured out two cameras within my budget, one by Canon one by Nikon. I chose the one edging slightly in reviews and which had a half decent deal with freebies, the Nikon D5100. 

      This camera took me through the last year of university, lots of photos for this blog, and all of my holidays and days out over the past 3 years. The D5100 is a great camera, and it did well for my needs for a long time. As an aerialist and performer, I have started photographing shows more and more in the past year, and that it where it started to let me down! Low light is always going to be a killer when it comes to photography, and as much as I could do, I wanted something a little better! 

       Around 6 months ago I started working in a camera shop, and this was where the itching started! Working for a large technology company for 2 1/2 years I tend to nerd out over things a fair amount a lot more than I did before... Being able to play around with cameras all day I was like a kid in a candy shop, it was great, but actually terribly more confusing. There is definitely no such thing as the perfect camera, and I spent a huge chunk of time being indecisive and discounting models for various reasons. Too big, too heavy, don't like the viewfinder, too expensive, horrible menu system etc. etc. 

      And then one day we had a Pentax K-70 arrive in store. Having only been announced in June, we were expected to have a play around with it and get used to its features. And so, I did the ridiculous thing and I switched systems! I traded in everything Nikon I owned and I bought K-70 with an 18-135mm and a DA 50mm prime lens. I thought for all you camera lovers out there I should explain why I went for a camera system that for most people is a bit of a curveball:

Weather Sealing - Almost all of Pentax bodies are weather sealed, and not just a little bit.. Combined with a WR lens these cameras survive a crazy amount, in Florida I was doing a timelapse of rain falling in my parents swimming pool in a tropical storm - no worries! The build quality on this camera is mad, it feels solid in your hand yet is as small as my old entry level Nikon body. 

In Camera Stabilisation - No more VR vs Non VR lenses, put any lens on this camera and it is stabilised. Everything is done in body, and it works really well. I have noticed myself taking photos and assuming they will be shaky hearing a slow shutter speed only to find they are sharp, it is like magic. 

K Mount Compatibility - Pentax have not changed their mount since their film camera days, this means you can find any old K mount film lens (of which there are hundreds) and you can stick it on your digital body. This has two advantages. One - you have access to a huge range of lenses at a lower price, you just use manual focus. Two - because of the in body stabilisation these lenses are also fully stabilised! My camera also has focus confirmation so it will beep/flash when your subject is in focus which is handy.

The gorgeous Sunny taken on a 135mm f2.8 film lens.

Wifi & In Camera Processing - Ok so pretty much any new camera now has Wifi but combined with the fact that I can process images in camera this has been a godsend. I can now take a RAW image, choose filters, image style, cropping etc. and save a new version directly on my camera before sending it to my phone via Wifi. My Instagram feed is now much more heavily filled with Pentax K70 images rather than low quality iphone pictures and it makes me happy how easy it is. 

Zen lemur! Sunning itself this morning at Wild Place in Bristol this morning #wildplacebristol #wildplaceproject #lemur #ringtailedlemur #pentaxk70 #pentaxians

A photo posted by Josie Maskell (@josiethejump) on Dec 1, 2016 at 9:18am PST

In Built Intervalometer - This is something I have yet to utilise enough, but if you are into timelapse photography you will love it. I can set up my camera to take a number of photos, pick the interval, file size, file type etc. to then create timelapse videos or image sequences. Below is a very basic attempt to show the storm weather we had in Florida - don't judge I haven't spent too much time on this...

Our end of #hurricanehermine nothing too serious just lots of wind and rain! #timelapse #video #weather #florida

A video posted by Josie Maskell (@josiethejump) on Sep 2, 2016 at 10:26am PDT

Multi Exposure - Harking back to anyone who used film photography this is a mode that is great fun to play around with. You can combine 2-2000 images with 3 different blending modes to create unique and interesting photos. I believe this is also designed for creating star trail or astro images which require a large number of exposures if your camera were on a tripod - as someone who has never tried this I wouldn't know where to start. 

RAW File Image Quality - Now I cannot vouch for all the new cameras, but the recovery and quality from RAW files on this camera has been incredible. I put it to test a lot on my trip to Florida in September and here are some before and after shots when recovering shadows and detail in tricky sunset/low light situations. 

    
  Now obviously everyone has very specific tastes when it comes to cameras! And no camera is perfect, lens wise, the 50mm is probably my favourite for images though the screw drive autofocus is comical levels of noisy! Pentax please, please please make a budget friendly and quiet 50mm lens, the 55mm f1.4 is £650 which I can't really stretch to... Noisy lenses aside, here are a few of my favourite images from the past few months since owning this camera.

Photo walk around Lacock Village

      Last week on my day off I decided to get out of Bristol and go for a bit of an explore. My parents house is near Grittleton in Wiltshire, and there are many villages in the area which I used to frequent, whether on my bike or driving over for an explore! Lacock is one of my favourites, it has kept very traditional with its cobbled streets and quaint houses with decorated windows! Lacock is also famous for being featured in TV shows and films including Harry Potter, Cranford, Downton Abbey and Pride & Prejudice. 

      The lighting on this day was very flat and subdued, the skies were overcast and gray meaning a lot of the buildings I photographed needed a bit of a boost in the contrast. I have been using Lightroom more and more recently to experiment with adding my own levels of vintage style filter. I tend to do an initial lighting and colour correction edit before making a virtual copy which I then edit more heavily! 

*Quick tip - Creating virtual copies in Lightroom is great to make different versions of the same photo without losing or overriding your initial edits. Click Command+' (mac) or Control+' (windows) to create another copy of that image before adding your edits! Great for creating a colour version and then one in Black and white or sepia, or for trying a few crop variations. 

      I have been using lens correction tools to create vignetting and also playing around with split toning and camera calibration to add different tones to the images. 

      This raspberry bush really came out with this filter! I loved the subtle colours it creates. 

      The two above images both needed some contrast to bring out the patterns in the bricks and the shadows from the vines.

      

      Just a few of my favourites from the day! Let me know what you think, what are your favourite photography/drawing locations?!

Day Three - Framing

     Day three of the 5 day photo challenge was all about framing. So far this challenge has been spread across a couple of weeks rather than days but I blame that on the horrible rain scaring me away from going outside!
     This challenge was about looking for an interesting way of framing the subject using different objects. I went to Oxford for a day out with my oldest friend Missi who I hadn't seen in ages. It was a gloriously sunny day and we had a nice wander around the city. I wanted to go to the botanical gardens at Oxford University as I had read up on them having lots of greenhouses full of different types of plants and I thought I could get some good pictures.
     I managed to take some cheeky portraits using all of the leaves and plants in the greenhouses as a natural frame! I quite liked how these images turned out, the soft focus of the leaves drew you into the subject nicely.

Another of my favourites was the image below where I used a decorative gate to frame her, I liked the shadows and the fact that the light from behind highlights the subject of the photo. 

I also managed to take some quite nice close up pictures of flowers, I was using my 35mm prime lens which has a super wide aperture of 1.8, great for getting shallow depth of field and lovely blurry backgrounds.

Day 2 - Searching for lines

     Ok so the last blog post I wrote was day 1 of a composition photography challenge searching out interesting light. This day's challenge we were meant to keep searching for light, but look for interesting compositional lines as well!

     It was a horribly rainy saturday, me and the boyf decided to go to theWildlife Photographer of the year exhibition at M Shed in Bristol. It is definitely worth a visit, some truly incredible photos, though I suggest avoiding weekends when it is raining as it was full of noisy kids and we queued to get in...

     I took a grand total of around 12 photos because I hate rain, and there really wasn't much interesting light to be found on such a grey day. Bristol is famous for having rows of colourful houses in some areas and I loved the look of these pastel coloured ones by the waterway. 

There was a dreary blue colour cast which I fixed, I also brightened up the sky and saturation a little to try and bring this image out of the grey. 

This second image is a few more houses, I really liked the line of aerials against the sky like little wire flags!

     My final images were of some very rustic looking cranes by the waterside. I wanted these to be quite monochrome against the stark sky so I pushed down the saturation and exaggerated the lights and darks to make the images more contrasty. 

     In all I could have spent more time taking photos this day, I like these few but I would like to have spent more time if it hadn't been raining so horribly!

Starting Fresh

     So it is still very much feeling like new year for me. I know it is February, but since I spent most of January in America travelling and then coming home and being jet-lagged I am still very much in the "new year" mindset. It has been a long time since I posted on this blog. The last few posts have been me sharing interesting artsy things I have found and it feels like a very long time since I did anything super creative! 

     Time really starts to fly when you finish university, it has been over 2 years now and I have decided to get motivated and take some time to focus on getting my skill set back up and focusing on learning some new things. I have had an account with Lynda.com for a long time now, they have a huge range of tutorials on all manner of design/marketing/software subjects. 

     So the first thing I have decided to focus on is photography. I have always been interested in photography, most of my experimentation has been as a self taught amateur with a lot of make shift tools but I just bought myself a new camera lens and wanted to try it out.

     I have taken two courses so far, one on Colour Correction in Lightroom and one on Low Light photography, both focused quite heavily on fixing White Balance in images after they have been taken. To start practising I also watched day one of a 5 day photo challenge which started with a challenge to go out searching for interesting light and see what you can come up with.

     These images include a couple I took of some flowers in my house when I first got the lens and the rest are from a walk I took all around Stoke Park Estate in Bristol. When walking around i tried to focus on finding areas where the light was bringing out highlights on leaves and trees.

     Ok so here is a little picture of my workspace on Lightroom. One of the biggest things I learnt on the Colour Correction course is how to use the Eyedropper tool to fix White Balance. Clicking on a neutral gray area of the image with this tool lets Lightroom know how to balance all the colours out if there is any kind of colour cast. Aside from some shadow and highlight edits the edit above was done in One click! I can't believe I have wasted my life fiddling around with colours when it was this easy...

     Now the outdoor images were much more of an issue as there wasn't any kind of neutral gray area of the picture to use as reference. I did most of these edits based on the histogram, pulling the temperature and tint sliders up and down until the colours moved to the right place. 

     Now as someone who has spent the last 8 years using artistic license rather than actual colour science I have to say I am feeling a little skeptical about this. The image above was colour corrected to the one on the right, but i much prefer the left hand image straight out of camera. It is safe to say you can follow the science all you want but this won't always make an image you like, it is worth moving away from rules every once in a while if you prefer the artistic outcome.

     I think the biggest things I got from this course are interpreting histograms, knowing how to use different tools to change the histogram data and also using clipping measures to stop blowing out shadows and highlights. I will definitely combine these skills with my own artistic eye, but I feel happy in the knowledge that I know a bit more about the colour science. 

     Here are some of my favourite images from todays edit: