Tag: photography

Nifty Fifty - Pentax smc DA 50mm f/1.8

February 2, 2014 8:26 pm

I finally got a "nifty fifty" lens, the Pentax smc DA 50mm f/1.8.  I've been busy getting this new home for the blog up and running and haven't had much of a chance to play with it yet.  But I did, of course, take a couple test shots when it arrived earlier this week.

Prime 50mm lenses are often referred to as "nifty fifties."  The name apparently stems from the Canon EF  50mm f/1.8 II which earned the title for being affordable and still having good optical qualities.  The nickname has leaked out to pretty much any manufacturer's 50mm lens that maintains good optics while hitting an affordable price point.  My understanding is that since the 50mm lens has long been a staple of the industry pretty much every manufacturer has a "nifty fifty."

The Pentax smc DA 50mm f/1.8 definitely earns this title.  I picked it up new for just under $200 (I'd been waiting months for a good price) and the image quality is fantastic with great depth of field control.

Here's the first test shot I took:

Pentax 50mm f/2.0 test shot
50mm prime, f/2.0, ISO 2500, 1/60s

The sharpness is quite good and the depth of field is very slim (at f/2.0 and a short object-distance).  I look forward to playing with this lens more.

Now Presenting: Serindu Gallery

June 4, 2013 9:34 pm

I've been working on a new project recently.

It started with the goal of a photography gallery website where I could put my pictures and allow people to self-service buy prints/canvases/etc. through one of the many companies that sell such things.

I found a promising option, but it turned out to not be as helpful as I had hoped.  They wanted me to sign up with a payment processing company, file for a state tax identification number, etc, etc.  Way more effort than I wanted to go through.

Then I found another option, but, on top of the cut they take for each sale they also want $30 a year, which I don't really feel like paying.

So I took another tactic: I created a photography gallery website and licensed my pictures under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.  It's not nearly as complicated as it sounds.  It essentially means you can do just about anything you want with the photos except use them commercially so long you attribute them to me as the copyright owner.

So anyone is free to have prints or canvases or whatever made from the photos.

Without further ado, I present Serindu Gallery:

serindu_screenshot

Serindu is just a name I made up years ago for an online game, it doesn't mean anything, I just like the way it flows.

Tools used to build the site:
Django, Django-photologue, Django-tagging, Bootstrap, Bootstrap-Image-Gallery, jQuery, and BrowserState history.js.  I also used the webfont Tangerine.

Views of the Bay

May 12, 2013 3:30 pm

Driving to Tilden Regional Park from Livermore takes you along a "mountain" pass where the road winds back and forth from the Bay-side to the valley-side.  There are some stunning views from some of the pull-offs.  So on our way home from the park we stopped so I could hop out and take a few pictures.

I turned the pictures monochrome because the images were very blue and there wasn't much of any other color visible.

Here's a view of San Francisco over the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge (or locally, The Bay Bridge, even though there are many bridges over the bay).  The gigantic tower in the background is Sutro Tower.

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This is a picture of the Golden Gate Bridge.  The second tower is just barely poking through the clouds.  And I believe that's Alcatraz in the lower-left corner.  I used a very strong noise removal filter on this one which gave the whole image an oily quality to it which I like.

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