Dundee sunset

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Having spoken yesterday about perhaps placing my K10D and 21mm DA on permanent car duty, I was glad I had the combo in the boot yesterday for a pretty spectacular sunset. I was on my way back to work halfway through my shift when I saw what was developing. The priority was to give myself a clear view of the sky so I drove up to the top of the Dundee Law ("law", in this case, meaning "hill").

It's an extinct volcano more or less right in the middle of the city and offers a wonderful panorama of the skyline and the hills of Fife across the River Tay. When I got there, I found three other photographers had already beaten me to it - and they had tripods! Still, the handrail on the parapet that encircles part of the summit is quite wide and flat so I was able to balance the K10D on that and use the self-timer to trip the shutter.

I could really have done with a longer lens as the 21mm, as wide angles tend to do when used like this, reduced everything to tiny proportions. Still, it will give you a flavour of the scene which was much more dramatic than the pic is able to show. If you look at the full image (by clicking on it) you'll see that the yellow tones in the sky have clipped a little and are pretty featureless. I've found that the intense brightness that often accompanies a sunset can be too much for a DSLR. A colour print or slide film may have captured the sky more accurately but, in the case of the slide film, at the expense of shadow detail. I have another few frames that had less generous exposure and I should be able to clone in some details from the same part of the sky to improve matters.

The dark mound on the right of the picture is Balgay Hill which is an ancient plug that erupted from the volcano many moons ago. The expanse of water is the Tay and the stretch that figures in the pic is Invergowrie Bay. Last night, I looked out my D700 and 28-105mm Nikkor just in case there's a repeat performance of nature's light show. Peering out of the window at 2.50 p.m., it's looking quite promising!

What to do with the K10D?

Advertisement I've been giving the K10D an airing again and enjoying the freedom from weight and bulk that comes with sliding the 21mm DA onto it. If you've followed this blog for a while, you'll maybe remember that I have a big compatibility problem with the camera and this lens. I have to go into debug mode and dial in something like +175 to get the combination to focus properly. If I do that, it means the camera wont focus with any of the other lenses I have for it. That's caused me to contemplate selling my Pentax digital gear since I don't use it that much nowadays anyway.

However, as a change from lugging around the D700, I decided to debug the camera to work with the 21mm and have been enjoying a level of sharpness that I could never get before when using it. If I could add the 70mm DA to that pairing, I'd have a really nice, lightweight outfit so I contacted Pentax UK to see if they could do whatever needs done for the camera to be calibrated to focus properly with the 21, 40 and 70 DAs, all at the same time. Unfortunately, they said the K10D would have to be shipped out to Pentax in Japan as the work couldn't be done in the UK. It would seem to be more complicated than just calibrating the camera for each lens and storing that setting.

Pentax UK couldn't give me any idea of how much this would cost and I don't know if I can be bothered sending everything away and waiting for weeks just to find out that it's really not justifiable given the amount of use the outfit is getting. I'm still thinking this one through but, in the meantime, I've been snapping away with the 21mm DA and enjoying it. If any Pentax engineers in Japan read this post, please feel at liberty to offer a free calibration service in return for the invaluable publicity this blog has given you over the last few years. ;-)

I took the K10D out for a walk the other day and passed Arbroath Football Club's stadium. There's so much barbed wire around the perimeter of the ground that it looks more like Stalag 17 than a sports ground. I tried to capture that in the shot below.





The photograph above is of one of the entrances to the ground. Looks pretty inviting, doesn't it? Maybe if the club could see that it's not presenting the friendliest face to the world it might be able to attract bigger crowds. Or maybe the East German look is necessary to keep the vandals and thieves at bay. In that case, a gun tower in the corner might be the way ahead.



And speaking of vandalism, a graffiti "artist" has made a reasonable fist of artistically defacing a building not far away that looks as if it once provided changing facilities for people going for a swim or sunbathing on the beach. Perhaps "23" is significant. Could it be the number of functioning brain cells possessed by the artist? Or perhaps it's the number of brothers and sisters he or she has, fathered by his uncle, out of his mother? Take a look at the slates in the roof in this pic. The 21's moustache distortion gives them a pretty funky line.

Are you detecting a grumpy old man theme yet? I tried to cheer myself up that day by taking my daughter, Freya, into an amusement arcade the walk took us past. She emerged with a large tub of blue and red coloured slush that had more 'e's in it than the hexadecimal colour code for very pale grey (own up all the geeks who got that wee joke!). That's Freya below, just before the e numbers kicked in. She was last seen heading out over the North Sea. The one below that is a shot of an air hockey table that caught my eye.





Rounding off this rambling post is a shot I took when we were on the way home. It's a local castle aglow in the evening sun. With just the 21mm on the camera, I had to walk a fair distance to get close enough to it but it was worth it. Ten minutes later and the sun had dipped low enough in the sky to leave the castle in shade. The 21mm DA has definitely proved its worth over the last week or so since I started using it in debugged form. I might even just keep the K10D and the lens as a walkabout outfit or on permanent car duty.



All of these, by the way, were shot as jpegs and had a little levels adjustment made in Photoshop.