The idea was, since I just upgraded to Lightroom 3, that I’d import whatever was on the cameras, beautify it, and report back on the big new release.
Except for something went wrong; the most interesting pictures were all taken in a six-minute span out on the porch after dinner, and for some reason the big Pentax was in JPG not RAW mode, which drastically reduces Lightroom’s scope. It’s actually not that easy to switch the camera over; I suspect one of my children of fiddling with it while I wasn’t looking.
Having said all that, Pentax ships a pretty damn good JPEG engine in those cameras; so consider the following as a photo-essay on a bright early-summer back-porch evening. I’ll be back to discuss the subtleties of Lightroom 3 once I have more challenging raw material.
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That last shot is a dogwood, the replacement for our recently-deceased pear tree, now in June somewhat past its prime but still pretty nice to look at as the sun coasts sideways and down, but mostly sideways at 50°N latitude.
Comment feed for ongoing:
From: Zach (Jun 09 2010, at 20:12)
On my old K100D I pretty much never switch over to RAW. In most of the scenes I shoot (outdoors with bright light, indoors with overhead light, outdoors in shade) I've rarely been able to improve upon what the camera gives me, in JPG or RAW.
That's not to say it's not possible to improve on the RAW, but Pentax is sure doing something right in their JPG conversion. As a bonus I can shoot more pictures in a shorter amount of time, so I'm more likely to get that "lucky" shot when photographing action.
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From: Daniel Black (Jun 09 2010, at 21:24)
Hi, Tim,
I can probably find this via a search, but being a (mostly unrequited) lover of Pentax gear (I have only a P3, but have craved both of the recent K20D and K7D models), I'm curious which Pentax you've got. Hopefully Some Day [tm] I'll have one of my own.
Cheers,
Daniel
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From: Mike (Jun 10 2010, at 01:16)
On Nikons there is an Easter egg quick way to revert to defaults, which includes going back to JPEG. This is really handy when you just want to start fresh, without digging through dozens of settings. All you do is hold two of the buttons down simultaneously for a second or two. They're marked cryptically with green dots, so you need to have read the manual to know this.
Perhaps Pentax has such a feature that accounts for your reset?
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