Dave Brown

See also, lens distortion.

I see almost no distortion. Just to check, I have applied “trapezoid” perspective correction to your low-resolution image. With no distortion one trapezoid would do, and since it doesn’t, first image shows your true distortion. Second correction straightens the lines almost completely resulting in “architectural” photo:

Of course, at this point plenty of details are lost, and I can’t judge the proportions by looking at just one photo — to do this right I would have to apply correction to the original images, and use a photo taken from a distance to match the proportions.

It’s not that it’s got oversaturated colors – I’d argue that it’s overexposed. All the white surfaces are washed out. Maybe the camera is trying to make the girl in black not be black or something?

I’m assuming (since you said as much in the previous post) you’ve still got it in auto-everything mode, in which case blaming the tools /for their choices/ is perfectly reasonable.

Actually, I bet the fact that 4/9 of the image is gray simply tricked the auto-exposure into thinking it was pretty balanced at that exposure, but that a stop or two less would have been much better.

Let’s test this hypothesis. Even brightly-colored surfaces of the vending machines do not max out any of the color channels, so some correction should be possible:

First image has reduced saturation, second one has reduced brightness, third one is the result of reducing brightness only in the higher half of the range. Corrections applied to the second and third images apply uniformly to all color channels. Second image (that should look better if the original image was just overexposed) looks even more saturated, however the third one seems more “natural”. Overexposed in a nonlinear manner that produced higher contrast?

dpreview gave the pentax k-2000 a pretty harsh review,

http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/pentaxk2000/page34.asp

- Poor JPEG engine. Looks like you could manage this by shooting in RAW. But then you’ll have to come up with a good RAW management workflow.
- You need the flash up for AF assist? WTF?
- No focus point indicator?
- No orientation sensor? Lame.

- Poor JPEG engine. Looks like you could manage this by shooting in RAW. But then you’ll have to come up with a good RAW management workflow.

dcraw + anything jpeg-supporting should be enough as a replacement for builtin jpeg, and there is always cinepaint for real >=16 bit per color processing — and those are just free/open tools.

- You need the flash up for AF assist? WTF?

AFAIK, it’s possible to disable flash for actually taking the picture even if it’s on for autofocus.

- No focus point indicator?

As in real optical SLR focus indicator? I guess, it’s a problem if you don’t use autofocus…

- No orientation sensor? Lame.

And it did not come with a lens cap. Don’t forget the lens cap.

And it did not come with a lens cap. Don’t forget the lens cap.

That turned out to be a failing of the store that sold it (they misplaced it), not Pentax. That particular shortcoming was solved by investing the awesome sum of three hundred yen to buy another, and considering the missing lens cap made the store give me more than ten thousand yen off the camera in the first place, I’m not complaining.

In my experience, there is always a better thing out there, especially if you’re willing to spend more money. Indeed, when it comes to spending more money on a camera, the sky’s the limit. The dpreviews guys seem to start by assuming an infinite budget.

The only one of the complaints they have about it that can’t be fixed relatively trivially in post-processing is the uninformative autofocus.

I remember a friend telling me once to turn of the white balance, whatever that is to avoid “whiting out”. Check the manual.

Well, I think you won’t be too limited by your camera. It’s just good to understand its shortcomings, and know how to correct for it. (My D300 for instance likes to over-expose in many situations.)

Though it’s actually pretty rare to see dpreview give anything less than highly recommended to a DSLR. Though, since the entry-level DSLR market is becoming extremely competitive, maybe they’ve been getting harsher.

How did the cost/features for this compare against Cannon’s/Nikon’s entry level line?

I’m a little intrigued with the micro-4/3rds that Olympus is pushing. I have a few friends playing with Panasonic GF-1’s, which while a little pricey, show some promise to the overall system.

Well, I got a particularly good deal on it—Pentax has just released a new entry-level DSLR (the K-x), and that’s available in PRETTY COLORS!!!!11 This means that nobody wants the old boring black K-m, so retailers have been letting it go for somewhere in the realm of 75% the price of its nearest competitors.

“White balance, whatever that is” is about my level of understanding of how the camera works right now. It’s actually pretty cool—I’ve been taking pictures all my life and now suddenly I realize that with a more advanced camera, I can take much much better pictures. But since it’s a much more advanced tool, I have to learn so much more about how to work it.

Hitting a point where you learn just enough to know how much you don’t know about something is something that should happen to everyone at least once in their lives.

Happens to me all the time! I realise the older I get, the less I know.

Well, I did upload the full-resolution photo (follow the photo’s link to the Flickr page and then select “all sizes”). Have fun.

The perspective on that kind of freaks me out. Because in order to get a picture like that, I’d have to be floating in the sky at about the 15th-story level, but the picture is still obviously taken from ground level.

I tried it turned down a stop or two to see what would happen. I think you’re right:

.

I guess I have to correct for a slightly-overenthusiastic camera.

Also, after seeing the dpreviews page Wazm linked to, I told the camera just to give me the raw version instead of its JPEG version. I think that helped too.

Indeed…

Few months ago at work:

Boss: Hi, Alex, have you done any work on FPGA?
Me: No, though I am familiar with the concept.
Boss: Here is a new project — FPGA-based platform.

(I spend the next month studying theory, datasheets, tools, available IP modules, Verilog, VHDL, …, and finally schematics of the board others already built for that project).

What has put me off entering the dSLR market (apart from the price) is my expectation that the technicalities of taking a photograph could overwhelm my ability to actually, just, you know take a photograph. Automatic White Balance (AWB) is less precise than setting the white balance for the conditions and the shot you’re about to take at a given point but it does involve some effort before taking the shot, to present the camera with a white target to give it something to register as 100% “white”. With practice comes the ability to do this sort of thing quickly and without necessarily getting in the way of taking the picture but I find it somewhat off-putting, and for me the AWB setting is the one to go for in nearly all cases.