Lit Tree

Today started in rather a sweet fashion, with Miss 7 coming in to our room with the Fathers' Day card she had made for me, but forgot or mislaid yesterday. As well, as writing nicely inside, she had drawn the four of us. There was, however, a fifth figure, more stick-like and undeveloped than the rest of us, and just one colour. "That's my boyfriend" she informed me.

Right then. xP

I snapped this off as I was leaving work. I find these trees rather fascinating and very cool - though it's a bit sad how savagely they get chopped to avoid the powerlines.

Larger here.

I've changed my mind about what camera to get. I thought I was totally set on the Canon 600D - to the point I was about to order from eBay a Pentax K to Canon lens mount adaptor for my old Pentax 50mm. Mrs tsuken, wise woman that she is, suggested that I should hold off until I really am sure there would be no more changes to the camera choice. No worries, I assured her, I'm sure about it.

... well ...

Then I decided to have a look at all manufacturers around a similar price, rather than (as I assume many people do) getting stuck in a Canon vs Nikon mode. Up pops the Pentax K-30. Oooooh yes very nice plz. The low light performance of that in the tests for dpreview.com's review of it is absolutely stunning. Way better than the 600D or D3100 - and most especially the chroma noise just seems to be almost completely absent, even as it gets somewhat noisy up past 3200 ISO - a very good thing for shooting the black night sky.

The other thing I like is that (and this seems so very Pentax, from what I've read) it eschews flashy bells-and-whistles features that I simply wouldn't use anyway - whereas both the 600D and the D3100 are utterly replete with them. Also, the K-30 has lovely things like a mode (TAv) where you can control aperture and shutter speed manually, but the camera will adjust ISO to maintain the exposure; I've wished often for that mode, and there it is. In P - and possibly also M - you can just flick one of the two control dials to go straight into shutter or aperture priority modes, and back. That, also, is awesome. And a RAW button. Also awesome. In other words it has features I've wanted, and features I do want now I've read about them, and very few of the features that seem to me to be pointless.

Seems a winner to me.

Mrs tsuken is still holding off on ordering it until the last minute in case I switch again. xP

Little annoyance though: while Ted's have the best price I've found for the K-30, they don't appear to have in stock the Sigma 30mm f/1.4 lens I want with a Pentax mount. So I might have to wait for that. At least I have my old Pentax 50mm f/2 (which will actually be f/2, without the bloomin' great 50mm long adaptor I have for the Lumix, which has turned it into an f/4 lens) - so that will still be much awesome and big fun until I can get the Sigma.