Snow in Tombstone, and a warm Victorian home

50 degrees F when I woke up, dropping almost instantly to 32 as the big storm from the West Coast rolled in. First snow of the year! Huge wet flakes, best at 1/30? 1/640? Who knows. But great fun running around, without worrying about getting the K-70 wet.

Then over to coffee at a friend's Victorian home. An 1897 house, and let no inch of wall or counterspace go unfilled. But I love it, being from San Francisco and having grown up in an old 1915 home also with high ceilings.

Arizona! They say if you don't like the weather, wait til tomorrow. Which, if remnants of the storm are still with us, may be damp and foggy. We'll see!

Nice photos, the snow ball fight is great. Looks like a fascinating place to visit, hopefully one day I will be able to visit America. Pentax cameras are great in any weather that's what is so good about them

Wilt -- if you come to the USA, please visit Tombstone! Would love to see how you interpret this place... particularly with the style in your Sleight pictures posted in the other thread here, 'A few photos...'

Our Cochise County is a photographer's dream. The last of the true west, with the ghosts of Wyatt Earp and Geronimo and Doc Holliday and Naiche still at hand, here in town as the sun goes down and the spirits along our boardwalks come to life, and in the nearby mountains where the Apaches lived in their sky islands. Come visit, and bring your Pentax! Even in a flash flood downpour, it won't let you down, WR lens or not!

I like the way you capture the Character of your town Jon.

alex_virt wrote:

flektogon wrote:

alex_virt wrote:

Very nice photos! Great use of the 18-270!

Yes Alex, I agree with you that those are nice pictures. However I less agree with your second statement . If you check the focal length of Jon's pictures (these here and many shown previously), he predominantly uses the range between 18 and 70. Very rarely he goes for a higher zoom setting. So, I would personally go for a different lens with less zooming. But which one might be a huge dilemma. The DA 18-135 is pretty week, the DA 16-85 is heavy. Maybe DA 17-70 (with working SMD ) might be optimal...

I think Tamron 17-50mm F2.8 would be better. Technically, it's more like an F3.5 lens but is sharp even wide open and very good for indoor shooting. Another good option is Sigma 17-70mm F2.8-4.

While I agree with you and Flektogon that a smaller, faster zoom would be better in this series,  I think it misses what I perceive is Jon's point...   1 body, 1 lens, all day, no need for "luggage," as long as it's good enough for newsprint use.

For newsprint use, for sure. But in my double role as a tourism guy for the city here, I also send out images like these for internet display... to state and federal tourism agencies, to private travel tour companies, to online digital travel magazines, and to folks doing Facebook and Instagram. What's interesting is that the digital people want content. All they can get. They don't care about image quality the same way photographers do. My 2000-pixel-on-the-long-side images are just fine for the digital gang. That said, i try to send hi-res 300 ppi images to magazines printed on good paper... but these days, 250 ppi gets by without complaints.

I think it's the nature of any new technology to lower old quality standards... since the new benefits are compelling. At the start of my career in ad agencies, then-new offset printing blew letterpress out of the water, as photos were suddenly so easy to get into print. As far as work goes, if I could merge an iPhone with a Pentax case, I'd be in heaven. The Pentax ergonomics are unbelievably good compared to the clunky smartphones. But picture quality? The smartphones are like sharks in the water, coming up to rip chunks out of the established camera market, before devouring it altogether.

Jon Donahue wrote:

...

The smartphones are like sharks in the water, coming up to rip chunks out of the established camera market, before devouring it altogether.

No argument from me there.  I'm seeing that here too.

Jon Donahue wrote:

Wilt -- if you come to the USA, please visit Tombstone! Would love to see how you interpret this place... particularly with the style in your Sleight pictures posted in the other thread here, 'A few photos...'

Our Cochise County is a photographer's dream. The last of the true west, with the ghosts of Wyatt Earp and Geronimo and Doc Holliday and Naiche still at hand, here in town as the sun goes down and the spirits along our boardwalks come to life, and in the nearby mountains where the Apaches lived in their sky islands. Come visit, and bring your Pentax! Even in a flash flood downpour, it won't let you down, WR lens or not!

Hi Jon, It sounds like my kind of place, out in the wilds, full of history and very photogenic. I am 64 in January 2023 then only two years before I get my state pension, so maybe then I can make the trip

Don't know Chris Bauer ... but will try to look him up! Luckily, being retired and doing tourism part-time for fun with the city... and also writing stories for the local paper... I'm not competitive with anyone, just the reverse... we do everything we can to help photographers get their pictures here. They are #3 after #2, people who like state parks, and #1, tourists interested in wild west history. These three groups overlap of course. From there it's a huge jump down to birders, rock climbers, and bicyclists. My target from Christmas through end of April is actually RVers... snowbirds... most pull little cars behind their rigs, and we go to the large RV parks and do a dog and pony show about historic highway 80, from Benson south to Douglas on the border. Older people with money, and many with real cameras!

Hhh- I take the SD card from the camera, connect it to my iPad, copy selected pix to Photos, and then bring them one by one into Adobe Lightroom for cropping and editing. In the photo with the red lampshade at my friend's house... I increased Exposure by .76, then set it for the least Highlights, and lastly increased the Vibrance a little bit. Trying to get the photo to look like what I saw, which is probably impossible... my eyes are not sensors!