Pete Fang
Senior Member
It's been a while since I posted here and I believe it was around the end of April and I was busy preparing the trip to Greece in early May. Now that my wife and I am back, I haven't really got time slots that's long enough for me to go through over one thousand images I took in a one-week trip to this beautiful country. We spent two whole days on flights so while the trip was trom May 1 through May 9, we actually had seven days to enjoy. Before I let you see any pictures I'll write a bit of a summary first.
For the trip I packed the following equipment into my recently acquired Crumpler 7 Million Dollar Home bag: K10D with three batteries, two 4GB and one 2GB SD cards, DA21mm, FA 31mm, DA 16-45mm, DA 50-200mm, A* 85mm, Epson P-5000 portable storage viewer and a few B+W/Heliopan circular polarizers. The Crumpler proved to be a great bag, plenty of room for my stuff and comfortable to wear over a long period of time everyday. Of course had I decided to pack the FA* 80-200/2.8 instead of the DA 50-200 I may have a different feel.
The DA21mm was purchased shortly before the trip and it grew on me so quickly. It was the most used lens for the trip, I loved its coverage, size and weight. I used the 31mm for most of the low-light situations while the 16-45mm was used when the 21mm was lacking in coverage. The 50-200mm proved to be very useful when I was shooting from the high cliff down to the sea while the A* 85mm (which I got just before the trip) got the least use, but it did very well in those cases that I used it.
For the whole trip I was almost always the lone Pentax shooter out there surrounded by Nikon and Canon users. In our tour group there were only three people using DSLRs, the other two were all using D200s with 17-55/2.8 DX. In Mykonos, I encountered the first Pentax user and I had to go up and chat with him. It turned out that this gentleman was from Australia and he was using a *ist DL (or DL2). He showed great interest upon seeing my K10D with the DA21 mounted and told me decades back he had a Spotmatic! Other Pentax sightings were few and far between, perhaps three more times in Santorini and Athens with the DL/DL2 being used almost every time. I guess K10D lovers from here were all absent.
So how did the K10D serve me? I'd say it worked great most of the time. Although I shoot in RAW 100% of the time, I still wanted to make things right at the time of exposure. So the ability to dial in exposure compensation or change ISO with the dials easily made things so much easier for me. As the sun in Greece was strong during the day, I often dialed in -0.3EV or in some cases -0.7EV to prevent burning out the highlights or the white buildings. I used Av mode with the front dial set to control compensation and the rear dial set to control aperture value. When lighting was too tricky I'd sometimes use bracketing. The Epson P-5000 would download my whole day's work when we headed back to the hotel and it worked flawlessly. During ferry commutes I could also use it as a media player and its 640x480 screen is simply gorgeous!
Okay so much for the summary. Here's my pbase gallery where you can see the downsized images that I picked. RAW conversion was done by Silkypix 3.0 as usual.
http://www.pbase.com/pfang/greece_2007
I'll link many images in replies that following this. Feedbacks, criticisms are welcome. Enjoy!
Peter
--
Peter Fang - Pentax user for more than two decades: K10D / MZ-S / Z-1 / SFX / LX
For the trip I packed the following equipment into my recently acquired Crumpler 7 Million Dollar Home bag: K10D with three batteries, two 4GB and one 2GB SD cards, DA21mm, FA 31mm, DA 16-45mm, DA 50-200mm, A* 85mm, Epson P-5000 portable storage viewer and a few B+W/Heliopan circular polarizers. The Crumpler proved to be a great bag, plenty of room for my stuff and comfortable to wear over a long period of time everyday. Of course had I decided to pack the FA* 80-200/2.8 instead of the DA 50-200 I may have a different feel.
The DA21mm was purchased shortly before the trip and it grew on me so quickly. It was the most used lens for the trip, I loved its coverage, size and weight. I used the 31mm for most of the low-light situations while the 16-45mm was used when the 21mm was lacking in coverage. The 50-200mm proved to be very useful when I was shooting from the high cliff down to the sea while the A* 85mm (which I got just before the trip) got the least use, but it did very well in those cases that I used it.
For the whole trip I was almost always the lone Pentax shooter out there surrounded by Nikon and Canon users. In our tour group there were only three people using DSLRs, the other two were all using D200s with 17-55/2.8 DX. In Mykonos, I encountered the first Pentax user and I had to go up and chat with him. It turned out that this gentleman was from Australia and he was using a *ist DL (or DL2). He showed great interest upon seeing my K10D with the DA21 mounted and told me decades back he had a Spotmatic! Other Pentax sightings were few and far between, perhaps three more times in Santorini and Athens with the DL/DL2 being used almost every time. I guess K10D lovers from here were all absent.
So how did the K10D serve me? I'd say it worked great most of the time. Although I shoot in RAW 100% of the time, I still wanted to make things right at the time of exposure. So the ability to dial in exposure compensation or change ISO with the dials easily made things so much easier for me. As the sun in Greece was strong during the day, I often dialed in -0.3EV or in some cases -0.7EV to prevent burning out the highlights or the white buildings. I used Av mode with the front dial set to control compensation and the rear dial set to control aperture value. When lighting was too tricky I'd sometimes use bracketing. The Epson P-5000 would download my whole day's work when we headed back to the hotel and it worked flawlessly. During ferry commutes I could also use it as a media player and its 640x480 screen is simply gorgeous!
Okay so much for the summary. Here's my pbase gallery where you can see the downsized images that I picked. RAW conversion was done by Silkypix 3.0 as usual.
http://www.pbase.com/pfang/greece_2007
I'll link many images in replies that following this. Feedbacks, criticisms are welcome. Enjoy!
Peter
--
Peter Fang - Pentax user for more than two decades: K10D / MZ-S / Z-1 / SFX / LX
