guido_sardella

I have been a Pentax guy since I started to do photography, but a few weeks ago I became

interested into setting up a photgraphic trap, to rtecord wild animals in ther woods. To my

amazement, I discovered that Pentax camera are not suitables because they (and their

flashguns) needs to imput to go from sleep to shot.

So I soon will buy some used Nikon camera, one or two Nikkor lenses and two or three Nikon

flashguns just for this purposde, while I will contnue to use Pentax for the rest of my wildlife

photography.

With Pentax K10D you can use your screwmount lenses using a common M42 to K adapter.

Once mounted, you loose any aperture automation, so you use the aperture in stopdown,

with manual or aperture priority mode. The only problem is that as you close the aperture

ring, the image in the viewfinder become darker...

I recently got one from e-bay, the smaller version, with tilt/shift only on the front standart,

not the mini-view camera version.

In any case, the bellows has a screw-mount of 46mm diameter, quite larger than T2 or

M42x1.

I have no adapter, I am looking for one male to male 46-42 reverse ring and one 46-42 step

down ring to adapt to common PentaxK-M42 adapters.

There are some Hama bellows with tilt and shift. every once in a while, they pop up on eBay.

There is one right now on eBay.de that is like a mini view camera. Look for Hama balgenr䴬

that is the name in German for bellows.

I got mine (a simpler version, with tilt and shift on front standart only) for less than 150

euros.

You must take in considertaion also the multicoating. In the old days ('60 and '70s), only

Pentax had an advanced multicoating, that was also licensed to Zeiss, and that gave an endge

over colour reproduction and flare resistance, two factors that contribute to the creation of

the image as much as contrast and resolution.

By the '80 all the other manifacturers catched up, although still today the Pentax "super-

multi-coating" is considered among the best.

Why don't you buy a K100 to allow more money to be spent on lenses?

Anyway, to answer your question, it really depends what are you going to photograph.

I'd go probably with the 16-45 Pentax zoom, as I am a landscape guy.

If you are less interested into wide, and more about portrait, maybe is better the Sigma

17-70, which is also a nearly 1:2 macro.

The 24-90 is a very good lens, but personally I feel that a 35 mm equivalent on the wide

side is too limitating...

Shift corrects perspective, you use it (for example) to have tall building looking vertical and

not converging toward the sky. You can have the same effect (with degradation or reduction

of picture in post processing).

Tilt adjust the plane of focus: instead of having it parallel to the sensor/film plane, you can

alter the angle, to put in focus a floor, while the people standing on it are out of focus, for

example (as the "toy-city" craze of these days). You can have also this with Photoshop. But

you can also use tilt to maximize DOF, and this is something you can't replicate with post-

processing.

No, you can't use the tranform->perspective in Photoshop to correct fisheye perspective, you

need things like Phototools, PTGui, Proxel, that give you a panoramic image. Or try Fisheye-

Hemi, that corrects the image in a sofisticate way, inside the 2/3 ratio of the original image,

without introducing distortion to object in the sides.