parkerpyne_investigates
Ghetto portrait
My brother took advantage of the annual family reunion over Christmas to request some portrait-type shots to be used in some indeterminate business context.
The only gear available was my parent's K-x with the kit lens, a very suspect tripod and a manual flash gun that I couldn't trigger off-camera.
Lighting turned out to be the least of my problems: There was plenty of light coming through the huge living room windows. The biggest challenge was the lens and ultimately I had to abandon the kit lens with its small maximum aperture altogether - there was no way to isolate him against the background with an aperture of f/4.5 or f/5.6 at 55mm.
My father still has and regularly uses an old Olympus OM-1 and the OM-mount is at least similar enough to the K-mount that Zuiko lenses can be held flush against the Pentax mount. So I grabbed his 50mm f/1.8 lens and tossed the slow kit lens.
One limitation with this setup is the total loss of aperture control and I had to use the lens wide-open at f/1.8. The K-x's liveview greatly helped with focusing as I found out halfway through. All the shots where the focus is somewhat off were pre-liveview.
By and large I'm quite pleased what can be achieved with a modest K-x coupled with a 35-year old Olympus lens, a flaky tripod, no artificial light and a little bit of Photoshop.
Ghetto portrait
My brother took advantage of the annual family reunion over Christmas to request some portrait-type shots to be used in some indeterminate business context.
The only gear available was my parent's K-x with the kit lens, a very suspect tripod and a manual flash gun that I couldn't trigger off-camera.
Lighting turned out to be the least of my problems: There was plenty of light coming through the huge living room windows. The biggest challenge was the lens and ultimately I had to abandon the kit lens with its small maximum aperture altogether - there was no way to isolate him against the background with an aperture of f/4.5 or f/5.6 at 55mm.
My father still has and regularly uses an old Olympus OM-1 and the OM-mount is at least similar enough to the K-mount that Zuiko lenses can be held flush against the Pentax mount. So I grabbed his 50mm f/1.8 lens and tossed the slow kit lens.
One limitation with this setup is the total loss of aperture control and I had to use the lens wide-open at f/1.8. The K-x's liveview greatly helped with focusing as I found out halfway through. All the shots where the focus is somewhat off were pre-liveview.
By and large I'm quite pleased what can be achieved with a modest K-x coupled with a 35-year old Olympus lens, a flaky tripod, no artificial light and a little bit of Photoshop.