What 14.6 Megapixels will Do For You
I recently experienced a bad case of squanderlust, and spent a bunch of money on something that is bringing me great pleasure… A new camera!
I’ve been happily using my six-megapixel Pentax *ist DS camera for years, taking sharp, clear images that have brought a great deal of pleasure to many people. When the Pentax K10D camera came out with ten megapixels, I resisted the upgrade - I was being practical. However, when the 14.6-megapixel K20D came out, I couldn’t resist any longer. I gave my older camera (and some very nice lenses) to my beloved niece and spent the bucks for the camera and a new, super-duper lens. I’m in amateur-photographer heaven!
I’ve spent years being obsessive about getting the best-possible, sharpest lenses. Some of them are pretty old, but all of them are highly-regarded. Now that I have the K20D, every one of them is automatically stabilized for my shaky grip. The K20D’s image-sensor not only can move up, down, side-to-side and circularly (extremely quickly) to help prevent the images from blurring, it can move back-and-forth in tiny steps to automatically adjust for up to twenty lenses, to provide maximally sharp focus. It took me some time calibrate the camera for all of my lenses, but it was well-worth the effort:
This image is NOT meant to be artistic at all - Just a test of what the camera can do at the full 14.6 megapixels, with all of the best settings and environmental elements… It’s well-worth viewing at full size. If you’re viewing it in the newest version of Safari or Firefox, be sure to click the image once it has fully loaded, in order to see it at a 1:1 ratio. It shows the flowers that live on our dining-room table (we have over fifty orchids growing in and around our house), and it contains more information than 35mm film, using a sensor that is about the same size as a postage-stamp.
Here are some more examples (taken during the recent Orchid Show in Mission Valley). This set was taken at home, using a black-velvet background.
With a sixteen-gigabyte memory card and the spare battery pack that clips onto the bottom, I can shoot 657 images in RAW format (or 1,907 images in best-quality 14.6-megapixel JPEG format) without running out of battery-power. Yes, it’s a big, heavy camera with all of the doo-dads, but it fits my big, hammy hands really nicely.
I’m intrigued with the many, MANY options that I’ve never heard of before, but appear to have great artistic implications. For instance:
I’ve changed the settings so that I can press one button, which sets up the camera to take five photos with one press of the shutter-release, once right after the other, automatically varying the exposure. Some cameras have had this “auto-bracketing” feature for years, but this one can be customized to provide “High-Dynamic Range” images in Photoshop in just a few mouse-clicks. I put the camera on a tripod, press the button, press the shutter-release, and the camera goes snap-snap-snap-snap-snap. The images can then be automatically combined in Photoshop (using the File-Automate-Merge to HDR… command) so that the final image looks like what our eyes actually see (with details in shadows and clouds), rather than being limited to what the sensor can see. Human beings have tolerated crummy photos that simply don’t match the reality around us for over a century. The new sensors are catching up the human eye, finally. I’m still playing with that concept, and if I get some good results, I’ll post ‘em.
Another item that looks cool is that I can set my camera to the “P” (Program) setting, and it will automatically arrange the exposure-settings to provide the maximum sharpness available with each lens, based on the factory bench-testing settings that are stored inside each Pentax-compatible lens made since 1989.
I like the fact that I can set my preferences so that each RAW file can be stored as “DNG” (Digital negative) format. That’s an Adobe-created, open file-format that somebody will still be able to open and edit decades from now, as opposed to zillions of obscure, cryptic, soon-to-be-obsolete file formats. As a man with a lot of old Pagemaker files that I can’t open any more, I’m sensitive to this dilemma.
My other new acquisition is a Tamron 18-250mm lens, which comes very highly rated for such a super-zoom, but it’s still not up to my usual standards of super-sharpness. I’m a shameless snob when it comes to sharpness. I’ve exchanged the lens once already because the first one had such bad focus. I bought it for the trip to New York City that’s coming up in late June - If you have to have one “walk-around” lens for a trip, this is a great one. On a digital camera, it’s equivalent to a 28-388mm lens on a film camera. If you can’t frame a quick snapshot with THIS lens, you simply aren’t trying!
