Gimmee One'a Dem - Part Three - The Pentax K-70

Your mate who is buying their first DSLR as a kit camera may have heard of the Pentax name some years ago in the film era. It was hard to find a camera club, school, or group of enthusiasts in which a Pentax 35mm camera was not in use. That may have eased off a little in recent years - and I am not going to fire up speculation about why - but there is no reason why you should not set your friend out to look at the Pentax K-70 kit.

Note that the pictures of the cameras this week show the boxes they come in. Not just to make use of the designer's art - this is to give the purchaser some idea of the size of the packaging that these kits require. You'll see that the Canon and Pentax offerings come in one box while the Nikon camera is separated from the lens. Makes no difference? Well, consider how much extra trouble it would be to haul that camera box through the airport, airplane, customs, hotel, etc if you were required to take it with you everywhere on your holiday...

Hint: If you buy the camera kit here in Perth a week before you go on the airplane you DON'T have to take the blessed boxes with you. More space for duty free.

Okay, back to the camera body. It seems heavier than the Canon, though the lens is just as light. The mounting of the lens requires more force and makes more whizz-click noises but once it is on you need do no more. Remember that we encouraged you to get your mate to leave it undisturbed for the duration of the trip to avoid dust leakage into the mirror box.

The Pentax is also a swing-screen camera and as such does not put any control buttons down the left-hand side of the back. Some find this a help - some not. No southpaws are really catered for by the camera makers anyway so maybe it is just academic. The physical size of the Pentax and the shape of the hand hold mean that you do get a solid grip on the camera.

As your mate's mentor you are going to faced with a challenge - there are a lot of control options in the menu of a Pentax that are highlighted with interesting descriptions. They are tempting and will beckon to those who are attracted to bright colours. Once onto that pathway, your friend may customise their way to the point where the camera thinks that it is Salvador Dali and starts to make art instead of images. Teach them about the "reset " button that returns it to the factory formula and show them how to get out of trouble.

 Note that with the Pentax as well as any other camera, you are going to have to remind them to charge the battery and insert a memory card - and make sure that the memory card does not have the lock slider pushed down. If it does, the camera will neither format the card nor take a picture. You might think it is broken straight out of the box but the truth is it is just waiting for a sensible command from you. ( Don't ask me how I know this... ). Battery charging is about 90 minutes for these cameras so you can also do your mate a favour if you tell them to get an extra battery..

An electrical aside...the Canon, Pentax, and Nikon batteries for this week's cameras are all about the same size and weight. The casual user who looks at their images on the back screen or uses a lot of Live View might get  250-300 shots from a charge. At least all the cameras have a positive on/off switch and are unlikely to be left discharging the battery when they are put back in the case.

The other danger that the novice runs is the wonderful feature that Pentax put on the LHS of the camera - a dedicated RAW button that means you can crank in a RAW shot in the middle of a JPEG series. This is great for you but may lead to frustration for your friend if they hit it unknowingly. At the least sign of a developing photo enthusiasm, of course, you can turn them on to RAW processing, but be ready to have them change their image editing program if it cannot keep up.

Okay, be prepared to sort a lot of things out photographically when they get back from Thailand or Bali but hope that the automatic setting will have been in operation most of the time.

You have the backup of Camera Electronic and the Pentax importers if you buy it here and remember that they really do back their warranties.

Dumbing Up On Sunday Afternoon

Have you ever been bewildered by photography? I'm going to make a candid confession - I have -  many times. The first encounter with a camera that required me to set the focus, aperture, and shutter speed and then advance the film and count how many shots I'd taken was a daunting one. It was at high school and there were girls watching and I was terrified of appearing to be an amateur fool.

I've conquered that fear now and have become a professional one. People consult me for fool lessons. I could fool for Australia in several fields...and I have also conquered the fear of complex cameras. I readily whiz dials, push buttons, poke screens, and pinch and swipe with the best of them. At any one time I have 18 different criteria set on my cameras  - they function like Norden bomb sights.

But just now and then I succumb to an attack of the dumbs and want to do the least amount of thinking and controlling that I can. A Sunday trip to a car musem with the Fujifilm X-T10 gave me a chance to try out a new level of non-control. I switched on the AUTO lever.

This is a lever set under the shutter speed dial to allow the camera to take over nearly all its own functions and decisions. You cannot tell it to do much of anything in the way of ISO, shutter, or aperture and it will only agree to give you JOPEG images. But it shuffles through an amazing variety of pre-set program decisions to give a good result with no more than pointing and shooting.

The excuse Fujifilm gives for this is the idea that you hand the camera to spouses, children, or lesser mortals when you want a picture of yourself in front of the scenery. As you are not there to be fabulously technical, the lesser mortals have just one button - it is presumably all they can cope with. A very condescending lever...

Well I descended all afternoon and I am delighted with the results. I did put up the on-board flash of the X-T10 to fill some of the shadows, and I did make use of the fold-out LCD screen at the back for waist-level and floor-level shots but pretty near all the rest was just between the X-T10 body and the 27mm f:2.8 pancake lens. The percentage of keepers and usable illustration shots was over 90, and the only real danger for me was having no lenshood on the little lens.

It was good enough to encourage me to dumb it for more of the Camera Electronic equipment reportage events I do. Speed, discretion, and handiness are of prime importance for these things since any delay means that the snacks are gone before you can get to them. And I suspect that there will be a number of other cameras out there in the mirror-less or compact range that also have hidden control positions on their mode dials that allow them to run on autopilot very well.

Let " George " do it.

Fujifilm Week - Day Two - The X-T10

Well, I'm on familiar ground with the Fujifilm X-T10 - I own one and I use it every week. Heres a black one - mine is silver. The aesthetics of the two choices is something you can go and debate at the camera club for yourselves - the nights are cold and you can generate a useful bit of warmth by yelling at each other. In my case I bought the silver one because I fancied it and because I reckon as I wear down the edges they wont look as scuffed as a black one would.

You see, I am using the camera bare - no heavy aluminium Arca-Swiss cradle for this one and a rather elegant brown leather strap. And I mount a Fujinon 27mm f:2.8 lens on the front most of the time. The idea is to get the lightest and most capable rig around my neck while making me look like an innocuous tourist. Because tourists get away with it 99% of the time.

I discovered this on a train to the show the other day. Two 40+ tourists posed and vogued for each other in the priority seats for five minutes while other everyone else in the carriage tried to look the other way. I was longing to whip out the Fujifilm and capture them but did not have the courage. I regret it now.

Anyway, back to the X-T10. Some people have tried to decry this as the cheap cousin of the X-T1 and have failed to realise how good it it. The X-T1 is a magnificent camera and so is this one...but this one is smaller and lighter. It isn't weather sealed, but as I am smart enough to come in out of the rain, I have managed pretty well so far. It does not seem to be a dust magnet either because I have not been plagued with sensor cleaning.

The tilting LCD was the feature I wanted above all - my legs are no fun if I have been doing deep knee bends in the studio looking at a screen. I can't praise it enough. And one other feature endears it to me over its bigger brother - the EVF is just as fast and is a slightly smaller size - so I get to see all of it with my eyeglasses on.

I also appreciate the fact that there is a small popup flash secreted in the viewfinder housing. It is a battery drainer*, but invaluable for quick closeup lighting. I've even used it to get good room shots with a slightly higher ISO.

BTW, this is the first Fujifilm camera that has broken me out of the my self-imposed ISO limits. I used to quail at anything above 400. Then I shot a dance show at 800 ( with the extra speed I got another f stop and more depth of field ). Then I tried 1600, 3200, and have even shot at 6400 with success. And Good Old Fujifilm then supplied us with a firmware update for the X-E2 that effectively brought the same performance and features to that camera - so I have a T-10 in another form for field use.

The external controls via shutter speed dial, rings on lenses, and front and back thumb and finger wheels let me run speed, aperture, and ISO without diving into the menu. I must confess to rarely shifting the drive knob off of single exposure though I will try the high speed shooting on some jpegs later this year. The panorama shooting mode does fine - I rather like this one for tourism shots and even if I am not exactly steady on the turn it seems to make a reasonable strip.

I must also confess that I occasionally use the full automatic lever situated under the Shutter dial. In the days of my old X-10 there was something that they called EXR or SR mode that similarly took over the reins and it was a blessing in weird lighting conditions that I couldn't guess at. This is not to decry my great photographic knowledge ( hahaha x 8 ) but let's face it - even with the most sophisticated cuisine in the world, it is sometimes still most satisfying to eat fried potatoes.

If I were to have one gripe about the design it is that the tripod screw is off-centre. No big thing unless you swing round it for panoramas.

Final note - with a smaller-bodied camera like this there is a limit to the number of external controls that can be hung off it. The " Q " menu is your friend here - if you program it to your 16 most important criteria you can fly round the choices very quickly with the function wheel and menu buttons. I rarely have to enter the main menu for most shots.

I can thoroughly recommend the camera to anyone. Black or silver.

Note on battery life: I get about 290 shots per battery charge if I leave the LCD on. If I just use the viewfinder and chimp every 20 shots or so it'll go to 400.