Heaven. I’m in heaven…

…And my heart beats so that I can hardly speak.
And I seem to find the happiness I seek,
When we’re out together dancing cheek to cheek.

So sang Fred Astaire to Ginger Rogers in the 1935 movie Top Hat. He was singing to, and about, Ginger and not about his Pentax digital SLR camera. However these words come close to describing my relationship with my camera right now.

My Sigma 100-300mm f4.5-6.7UC lens has served me well over the years, beginning its tour of duty on my 35mm Pentax MZ-50 in 1998 then transitioning to my first DSLR, a Pentax *ist DS, and finally my Pentax K10D. However, mated with the K10D I was very aware of image quality issues when ‘pixel-peeping’. There was considerable noise, even at low ISO values, and a very soft focus. My Flickr photostream is testament to the good images that could be wrung from this lens if scaled down to approximately half size.

The 10 megapixels of the K10D translate to image dimensions of 3872 x 2592 pixels and I only publish to Flickr at a ‘full’ size of 1600 x 1071 pixels – about 41% of original size. This down-sizing is enough to hide almost all of the noise and most of the soft-focus issue. I sought online opinion on whether this quality was to be expected given my equipment and the universal response was that the lens was letting down the more than capable camera.

Well, I have just reached a milestone year of my life – the big four oh. For such occasion my parents bestowed on me my choice of expensive gift. What I chose was a brand new (and not long released) Pentax DA55-300mm f4-5.8ED zoom lens, which has now become the perfect partner for my K10D.

After some back yard comparisons, which looked promising, I took the new combo out to Wellington Airport on Sunday and clicked away pretty much as I usually do – i.e. making the same mistakes most likely. The zoom ring felt just right as I took advantage of the 55mm wide end of the range to fit in whole aircraft where before I had to make do with “detail” shots, up close with the 100mm minimum.

Upon returning home and viewing the results I can declare that the DA55-300 is a touch of glass! The results are, to me at least, astonishing. Others have remarked the same too.

So enough rambling – what about the photos!? I’ve posted 15 to my Flickr account and have chosen 4 to grace this blog post. Two of the images below are also viewable in their full glory by clicking the ‘full resolution‘ link below the picture. You may have to force your browser to show the image at actual size as many will scale it to fit your browser window. Trust me when I say you do not have a screen big enough to fit the whole photo, so if you can see it all, it’s been shrunk.

Note that the full resolution images are high quality JPEG files converted directly from the unprocessed RAW images from the camera. I.e. the images are stright out of camera looking that good!

First another view of Wellington-based Cirrus SR22 ZK-YUG. Yes, it was rather overcast!

Full resolution