New camera - the Pentax K20D

So I have a new toy - the Pentax K20D with a Pentax 18-250mm zoom lens. This is a very cool DSLR camera and at about half the price of it's Nikon or Canon equivalents, is about the best value you can get. Pro-grade at amateur prices!

I'm really just re-learning how to use a proper camera (haven't had one for years). I'd forgotten how enjoyable it is! You do have to be a little obsessive about things to enjoy it I guess, but I find just wandering around is enough to see things that might look good on film. The trick then is to work out how you want it to look and what that means for the camera. The rest is just the push of a button...

The photo above is of a dead plantation of trees east of the Mt Keith mine village here in WA. I took this at about 5:30 in the afternoon in full sunlight. As you can see, applying black and white with a blue filtering option looks cool. The colour version hasn't got quite the impact:

And the other thing, you can see the rubbish in the colour version (plastic bags in foreground).

The great thing about and SLR is the ability to set up shots at night without a tripod. By using a decent shutter speed (can go down to about 1/20s for handheld) you can then play with aperature, sensitivity and white balance to get cool colours from otherwise inane scenes. After much fiddling around and lots of attempts later, an otherwise boring scene outside my room on site looks like this:

That's an emergency eye-wash and shower station - hence the green light (supposedly the last colour you can see before you go completely blind). I just liked the orange of the walkway lighting up against the green.

Morning light is difficult. What looks cool to the eye doesn't always work on film. I have a lot to learn. Here was an attempt at the fairly cool clouds over the Mt Keith mill this morning:

And then you can just do cool stuff:

There will be more, stay tuned.