Straws in a lake

A fairly new one shot with my Pentax K-7 and the DA70mm Ltd.

An image from the archive

Just a shot I rediscovered while cleaning up the archive.

Fire in the sky

Just an image to prove that I’m still here.

Back on the streets again

Today I had a good hour on the streets with my 5D and a 50mm lens. It’s been a long time since I used the 50mm now, but it was very pleasant to carry a setup that didn’t scream “PHOTOGRAPHER” two blocks away.

While my Canon zooms, namely the 70-200 f/4L IS, the 24-105 f/4L IS and the 17-40 f/4L are magnificent, they are also huge. That’s a big problem on the street, but even while doing nature photography it’s a problem. Due to some back problems, I am reluctant to carry more than one of those lenses, and even then the setup is heavy on my sholder. Im really thinking more and more of the Pentax gear. So far the starting setup would look something like this.

• K7 body
• The kit zoom for family snaps (doesn’t really add much cost)
• DA 21mm f/3.2
• DA 35mm f/28 Macro
• DA 70mm f/2.4

After that, some potential candidates would be

• DA 15mm f/4
• DA* 50-135mm f/4
• DA* 16-50mm f/4
• DA* 55mm f/1.4

It is always good to have a zoom or two, and the DA* lenses are weather sealed as well, so there is an added benefit.

Anyway, here is some of the pictures from today. Remember, click on them to see a bigger version.

So far, so good

So far, everything goes remarkably well in out little family. Jonas is eating well and sleeps throught the night (except for a couple of feedings), so we get a fair amount of rest. While I certainly could have blogged more, I have pulled back on purpose to focus more on family these first weeks, but I miss writing, so I think I will start again. Probably not very frequent, but at least some.

Except for a fair amount of baby shots, there hasn’t been that much photography lately. I have managed to sneak out a couple of nights, but I haven’t found the inspiration to shoot. The mood has been more to sit down pondering.

Anyway, I’m back on the blog.

Lightroom slowdown

It’s been a while since I last did some Lightroom work now. Since then, version 2.3 has arrived.

This evening I sat down to process some shots I made down by the waterfront today. I did some basic adjustments, and then one single gradient before I decided to tweak the sharpness be bit.

Bad idea!!

It seems like Lightroom is unable to response to the sharpness sliders when there is a gradient in the stack. I haven’t tried it with local editing, but I expect similar behavior. The strange thing is that it doesn’t really consume CPU or RAM while doing this, and if it did, I have loads of both. It looks more like the gradient makes the software prone to napping. It’s just slow for no good reason. I mean, if it slowed down due to the intense calculations needed to process the gradient I could understand. It seems like it’s just some very poor quality programming, like Adobe goofed. It’s not the first time, and it won’t be the last, but I hate it every time.

Just some left behind bananas.

UPDATE:

The picture of the rotten bananas was not meant to be illustrative, it was just a lucky coincident. LightRoom, like bananas, are quite good, but not when it has turned bad.

patterns in snow