Monday 18 November 2013

The Pentax Q project - first days of shooting

So finally, I had a few minutes to spare on the street, yes minutes, not hours of searching and wandering the streets. I have made two training sweeps so far, yesterday (sunday) my wife and the kids went to Farsta centrum (the shopping center of Farsta, where I live). This day I only had some walk by shootings to try to figure out the camera, settings etc. I was shooting for maybe 5-10 minutes in total and found out that Mr Q is a tricky one to handle. The auto focus is quite slow and so far manual focus is not to think about because there is no viewfinder (I might try focus peaking later on), so I was stuck with pre-focus shooting style, so it was a bit difficult to nail the focus. It is only good shooting light between 10 am to about 2:30 pm (4,5 hours) right now here in Stockholm, so one really have to be efficient on the streets. The golden hour (or golden 30 minutes) sets in around 2 o'clock, and just forget about any light after 3 o'clock. I was out shooting between 1 and 1:30 and the light was still quite hard, and I clearly notice the 1.3 difference in exposure value of dynamic range (Pentax Q vs X100). The Q frequently clipped the whites and the blacks, where my X100 would have managed the light situation. 

Today I also had some errands in the center so I did a 10-15 minutes training sweep, this time alone. For today's session I turned off the sensor image stabilization, since I am shooting above 1/125 most of the time. I am shooting at f/2.8 most of the time, because this is where the 01 standard prime peaks. I was shooting in TAv mode (full manual + auto ISO), with the auto ISO set to 125-800. This set up seems to work ok, and I found that ISO 800 is more or less the maximum I want to go with the Q, beyond this there is loss of fine details. I must say I love the noise that the Q produces at ISO 800, it's very organic and "almost film like".

So here are the first 10 shots (from yesterday) from the Pentax Q experiment or the Pentax Q project as I now call it.













Note: my wife and our two kids in the background ;-)





Saturday 2 November 2013

The Pentax Q street shooter

So finally it is November and it is time to use my Pentax Q as my main street camera. This will be an interesting challenge. Unfortunately I will be quite busy with work the coming weeks, but I hope to get a few hours of street shooting done this month. October was also a very busy month and I didn't shoot many street photos. After Christmas I will have allot more time to hit the streets more frequently. Here are some photos from September and October.