Jupiter 9 85mm f2

This is a good and affordable portraits lens, yes 85mm lenses are not cheap. It comes in M42 mount. The bokeh of this lens is quite creamy to my taste. Although this lens is not sharp wide open, lens hood and flash light could really help.

Panning

The basic idea of panning is to move your camera in horizontal direction with the same speed as the object you want to take. I tried with shutter speed around 1/20 - 1/30 second.

Monthly Pentaxian Outing : October

The outing was held on October 16th at Little India. Starting point was at McDonalds, City Square Mall. I think more than 30 pentaxians joined this outing. There were few people who brought K-5 and K-r since the collection day for those new camera was one day before the outing. Pentaxians were very enthusiastic about the new cameras, and the new lens: DA L 35mm f2.4 :)

 
I used K 55 f1.8 and K 28mm f3.5 for this outing. 

Sensor Cleaning

It's almost six month since I bought my DSLR and it has been accumulating dust on its sensor. The dusts are not noticeable when I shoot wide open or at low f-stop number. I notice it only when I shoot macro with f16 or f22. It's quite annoying to see small dots on every macro picture that I took. 

I asked quotation for cleaning the sensor from both camera service center and camera repair shop, and they told me the cost is around 30 SGD. I read from the forum that sometimes repair shops only use blower to remove the dust (which is not good, sticky dusts won't disappear) or they do use sensor swab but perhaps the results are not good since there may be still some dusts left on the sensor. So I decide to do it myself. There are few options to clean the sensor: Arctic Butterfly, sensor brush, lenspen for sensor, sensor loupe, sensor swab with eclipse, visible dust swab, and many more. Arctic butterfly will cost me about 170 SGD, sensor loupe about 140 SGD, sensor swab with eclipse about 90 SGD, and visible dust swab about 30 SGD. Arctic butterfly is not within my budget, so I decided either to buy sensor swab or visible dust. In the end I bought visible dust. It came with 4 one-time use-only swabs and small bottle of cleaning liquid. Sensor swab came with 12 swabs and one big bottle of eclipse cleaning liquid (the liquid itself will cost me about 20 SGD). I was quite nervous to do this cleaning myself, since there is risk that I may scratch the sensor and render my DSLR useless.

First I turned off the aircons and fan to make sure no circulating air that may carry dusts. I saw on the internet, that bathroom is a good place since the number of dusts is lesser there than any other room. But I didn't follow that suggestion. I changed a new battery for my DSLR, turned it on, and chose "Sensor Cleaning" menu, then the mirror's opened up, I could see the sensor inside. I took one swab and put a few drops of cleaning liquid on it, cleaned the sensor from one side to the other side with left side of the swab, and back with the right side of the swab. I turned of my DSLR to let the mirror closed, tried to shoot at f22 with flash, and the big dust was gone, but I could still see few dusts, so I started again the process and hoped that there wouldn't be any dust anymore.

Before sensor cleaning :

After sensor cleaning :

Tada.... Sadly there's still small dust left on the top right corner. I have already used two swabs, I guess it's enough, I'll save the last two swabs for next month. I think I will need a sensor loupe since it will be easier to check the leftover dust without a need to put on lens and shooting at f22. I was happy enough not scratching my sensor (or perhaps I did scratch it), let's wait :)

SMC Pentax A 50mm f2.8 Macro

This is one of the best manual macro lenses in Pentax lineup, it would be better if you could get the 100mm version (but the price will be twice as much, at least). This lens has auto aperture, so we can set the aperture from camera body. The good thing of setting it from camera body is the built in (or pttl) flash can adjust its power according to aperture being used automatically. This is very useful in macro shooting since you won't get overblown images. Unfortunately it has 1:2 magnification only, not 1:1, but still this lens is tack sharp and the color is really nice.

Some shots taken using this lens :

With Raynox DCR150 combined :

    

Nightshoot using fast lens

There are two type of pics taken at night: long exposure or normal exposure. The former is done with a help of tripod and the latter is done with a help of fast lens or flash. Here are some photos taken using fast lens at night. Mostly taken at ISO 400-800, 1/100-1/150s, and f1.2.

Those were taken during mid-autumn festival.

Those were taken at Little India before Deepavali.