All posts tagged: K5

The importance of having access to a backup camera

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Last year, on my trip to India I took the Pentax 645D, a 35mm wide-angle lens and the new 90mm macro.   I also packed a Pentax K5-IIs with a 40mm pancake lens for low-light  street photography. The K5-IIs would also be my backup camera in the unlikely event that the 645D was stolen or had problems. The K5 takes the same batteries, charger and SD cards as the 645D. The body and pancake lens combined weigh about 800 grams so it didn’t t take up much space or weight if it wasn’t used. The image quality from the K5 is excellent, obviously not on a par with the 645D, but I would still be able to use the images for commercial purposes. While in Agra, shooting the Taj Mahal at dawn, the 645D suddenly stopped working. The shutter seemed to open for a couple of seconds then the screen showed just a black image. I turned it off and on, removed and replaced the battery, the lens, the SD cards, but the problem was …

Let there be underwater light (Part 1)

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A you descend beneath the ocean’s surface things become darker and bluer. Light is absorbed by the water and it does this to a greater extent at the red end of the color spectrum. When shooting in the shallows you can capture the vibrant colors of the reef, but sink a little further and your images will look a little green and possibly blurry from slow shutter speeds (or noisy from high ISOs). The solution is to shed a little light on your subject. Send in the strobes. I bought two used Ikelite strobes on Ebay (thank you Vadim in Australia). One is a powerful DS-161 strobe that has a 3W modeling light, and the other is a far less powerful (and much cheaper) DS-51 strobe that I use as fill. The above image is a pre-dive test in the bath, which showed that both strobes worked, and that the light from the modeling light allows the camera to autofocus on the subject. The strobes are positioned in this image for macro shooting. The lens …