I’d received several requests to see images taken with the Pentax 645D in low light conditions. (You can check out my Traveling Photographer article about shooting in low light here)
On my latest trip to Osaka I hoped to get a night shot of the Umeda Sky Tower. I chose the hotel and then the room (on one of the upper floors facing North) so that I had a chance at a good shot. As with other best laid plans (and I’m sure many mice will agree with me) things didn’t quite work out. Although I had a good view of the building the angle meant that I couldn’t look through the gap between the two vertical towers.
I still took the shot as I realized that this was exactly the kind of long exposure night shot that some photographers had been interested in seeing.
So here’s the photo. Taken on a tripod at ISO 200 f11 30 seconds with the 105mm lens from the Pentax 67 camera.
Umeda Sky Building / Long exposure test with Pentax 645D
I have also put the full size JPEG of this image on Flickr for people to check out. You can see it here.
TRAVEL 67 : Chris Willson Photography 
incredibly impressive….
very impressive shot, thanks for sharing.
Konnichiha Chris from blighty 🙂
Dslrs pics are usually sharpened in post processing.
Is any post processing sharpening applied to any of your Pentax 645D pics please … does images from the 645D need sharpening.
Hello Stranger!
I turned off in-camera sharpening, but post processing sharpening will depend on usage.
The full size Jpegs I put on Flickr have no sharpening applied. Smaller images on Flickr and on the blog usually have a small amount of sharpening done to them, but require less than a film image. When sending images to clients I always send them unsharpened.
🙂
Thanx Chris.
I like leaving images unsharpened.
This doesn’t classify as low light performance… any camera can make a clean image at ISO 200 with proper exposure. High ISO correlates with low light performance.
HI BP.
What I was testing here was not high ISO performance, but long (or at least comparatively long) exposure performance. Exposure of several seconds can lead to a lot of noise in images with some cameras. I believe this is why many low light photographers who use very long exposures (tracking stars etc) continued to use film after most had switched to digital.
Chris