Although Pentax never has been in the realm of Nikon, it is a good, solid camera and lens maker. The company invented the pentaprism that allowed the development of the single-lens reflex (SLR) camera. Since that time---the 1950s---Pentax has been creating a wide variety of lenses for the SLR and, more recently, the digital SLR. Here are some tips for using Pentax lenses.
Instructions
1. Start wide. Pentax makes a variety of fish-eye and wide-angle lenses that can give you a different perspective in your photos. Use the Pentax 10-17 mm fish-eye zoom, for example, to shape your world into a distorted but beautiful place. Even with the 1.5x factor of a Pentax digital camera, this lens starts way down at 15 millimeters with a 180-degree view. The lens lets you shoot from horizon to horizon, whether you are shooting a landscape or a city skyline.
2. Use ultra-wide-angle lenses such as the 14 mm f2.8. The difference between this and a fish-eye lens is that this lens corrects the distortion of the fish-eye and straightens things out while still giving you a very wide view. Use this lens or the 12-24 mm zoom from Pentax to shoot large gatherings of people, landscapes, seascapes and any other wide areas. Turn the camera to 90 degrees and get an even more unusual look.
3. Use normal lenses, those of around 50 mm such as the 55 mm F1.4, to shoot the real world straight. The normal lens takes photos at about the same perspective as your eye sees them. Use the normal lens to photograph people or animals or everyday scenes. With an open aperture of F1.4, the Pentax lens gathers a lot of light for shooting in low-light situations. Pentax also makes a variety of wide-angle-to-normal---smc PENTAX DA 18-55 mm F3.5-5.6 AL II---and normal-to-telephoto lenses---such as the smc PENTAX DA Star 50-135 mm F2.8 ED (IF) SDM---that give you the flexibility of changing perspective mid-shoot. For example, if you use the 18-55 mm zoom wide first to get a group of people, you can zoom fast to get individual faces without the bother of changing lenses. SMC stands for super multi-coating, Pentax's process for reducing glare in its lenses.
4. Shoot long. Telephoto lenses got much longer after the SLR camera made it possible to see exactly what you were shooting. Previously on rangefinder cameras, the maximum telephoto was about 135 mm because the viewfinder couldn't show the photographer what actually was in the lens' scope beyond that. After the photographer could see through the "taking" lens, 200 mm, 300 mm and 500 mm lenses became possible. The smc PENTAX DA Star 300 mm F4 ED(IF) SDM, for example, brings the action up close in sports or puts you back far enough to not disturb a bird on a branch but still get the good shot.
5. Use the whole range in one lens, the smc PENTAX DA 18-250 mm F3.5-6.3 ED AL(IF). The advent of digital cameras made it possible to get a much wider range of focal lengths in one lens. This lens, for example, will take you from a good-sized wide-angle view all the way up to a reasonable telephoto view. With the digital camera's 1.5x multiplier, the lens is the 35 mm-style camera equivalent of a 27-375 mm lens. That means you can shoot ducks in a pond as a group, then zoom into the eyes or beak of a single duck without moving or disturbing them with a lens change.
Tags: digital camera, made possible, makes variety, normal lens, PENTAX Star
