bought my camera

[Rick Camren]

Ok I went and bought the Pentax K-50, it came with 2 kit lenses (18-55mm and 50-200mm-both weather resistant), a shoe flash, camera bag, 16gb class 10 SD card, 4 GB eye-fi card for 551 dollars from Adorama. At first I was a bit discouraged as my pics weren't coming out the way I would have liked. Then I started playing with the settings and getting out of auto mode. I limited the ISO setting at it would want to go as high as it could most of the time. I took some photos of Xmas lights and found it worked best when I also used manual focus. After a few hundred shots I'm feeling a lot better and am confident as my experience progresses I'll improve.

I posted my photos at Flickr: lvrick89128's Photostream which also includes shots from previous cameras.

 

[dennybeall]

Enjoy Rick, keep at it and you'll find you learn something every time you pick up the camera.
If you have a thick skin try posting some photos for critique sometime.

 

[TCampbell]

On full auto-mode, a camera is going to take a picture roughly on par with a point & shoot. The camera uses an algorithm to find somewhat "save" exposure settings... but not very creative exposure settings (it has no idea what sort of subject you are shooting... so it doesn't know if you want to maximize "depth of field" (focused area) or minimize it. It doesn't know if you're trying to freeze action... or if you want a slightly slower shutter speed to blur motion. These are all creative ideas that the photographer might want to leverage, but the camera won't know that.

Pick up a copy of "Understanding Exposure" by Bryan Peterson. He does a pretty good job of explaining how to take advantage of the manual control of your camera so that you'll know what exposure settings will produce the results you want given your shooting situation.

 

[Rick Camren]

On full auto-mode, a camera is going to take a picture roughly on par with a point & shoot. The camera uses an algorithm to find somewhat "save" exposure settings... but not very creative exposure settings (it has no idea what sort of subject you are shooting... so it doesn't know if you want to maximize "depth of field" (focused area) or minimize it. It doesn't know if you're trying to freeze action... or if you want a slightly slower shutter speed to blur motion. These are all creative ideas that the photographer might want to leverage, but the camera won't know that.

Pick up a copy of "Understanding Exposure" by Bryan Peterson. He does a pretty good job of explaining how to take advantage of the manual control of your camera so that you'll know what exposure settings will produce the results you want given your shooting situation.

I took all manual night shots and had decent results considering I didn't have a tripod...i slowed the shutter depending on how fast the vehicle was moving, upped the iso to 3200, and used manual focus as it turned out to be quicker, I still need to work on things a bit but it is better than I thought..I tried to upload some shots but they are too big..ill have to resize.

 

[Rick Camren]

ok i posted a couple of pics in the general gallery

 

[TCampbell]

i slowed the shutter depending on how fast the vehicle was moving

Ok, wait... give the camera a fighting chance. You should be stationary when shooting photos.

 

[Rick Camren]

i slowed the shutter depending on how fast the vehicle was moving

Ok, wait... give the camera a fighting chance. You should be stationary when shooting photos.

I know...I didn't really have a choice in this case. We were at a Christmas lights display and we were on a slow moving trolley. Though i had a bit of a time when they hit 10 mph..

 

[TheStunch]

someone linked this earlier, so i'll shoot it up too....exposure triangle

Anyway, welcome to the Pentax club! That K-50 is a monster in any weather, lol. I have a Kx and a Q10, and both are a hoot to shoot with, and they really liven up in aperture priority and manual modes, as Pentax's auto is hilariously prone to high ISO your photos to death. Once you get a feel for it, if you go full auto, good on ya, if you are in aperture priority, try limiting your auto ISO to 100-the lowest functional ISO you can use, so the camera doesn't noise your photos out of existence. I'm not sure all the Pentaxes do this, but so far the Kx, the K50, and one or 2 others I have heard about do this high ISO ramming thing, and it's a quirk. If you grab a Canon, or Nikon, they tend not to do this as obviously, but the shooting experience on a Pentax, to me at least, is better, and I've just learned to love the Pentax quirkiness.