Winter Photo Walk

Saturday afternoon the sun was shining gloriously so I decided to walk to work (more for the walk than the work) and take my camera in case I saw anything worth photographing.

Two hours later (on a 20 minute walk) I arrived at work, somewhat chilled, having taken over 400 photos. Obviously, I found a few things to photograph :-) Considering I've done this walk countless times it's amazing that I found that much of interest. That's one of the things I like about photography - it helps you look and see.

I've been taking about 6000 photos a year so 400 is quite a few. It's not all that long ago that I would have been shooting film. I might have shot a roll (36) or two if I was extravagant. And then taken them for processing, and waited to see what I got, and had very limited options for tweaking them. The ease of digital makes a huge difference. I doubt I'd be doing anywhere near as much photography if it was still on film.

Thankfully it was only about -10c, not that cold (for Saskatchewan winter) and I'd taken some light gloves to wear while operating the camera. Although if I'd known I was going to stand around that much I would have put on long underwear!

400 photos took me about 4 hours to go through and tweak. I'm not big on black and white - I love color too much, but I did convert a few. My rule of thumb is not to show more than one in ten of the photographs I take. I thought that would be easy this time (because I shot a lot of similar ones), but it took some culling to get it down to 41 photos. That's still a lot, my apologies for inflicting so many on you. Some day I'll learn to be more ruthless.

I stopped for coffee on the way home and the sun was going down by the time I was finished. I put the camera away in my pack but I had to pull it out again - I can't resist the colors of sunrise and sunset.

click to view photos


I recently traded my three year old Pentax K7 for the new K5 II and I haven't had a chance to do much with it, so I was happy to take it for a spin. Physically it's pretty much identical, but it has an improved sensor (the same as the Nikon D7000) and an improved auto-focus system, giving it better low light capabilities. (Plus all the improvements that were made in the K5.) Some of the sunset photos were at 6400 ISO yet the noise was easily cleaned up by Lightroom. That's a lot better than the K7 would have done.  In theory it'll go to 51,200 ISO, which is amazing, even if the results are noisy. Pentax is known for their good ergonomics, and I would agree, but I wish the LiveView button was somewhere different. I often hit it by mistake when changing the focus selector, or even with my cheek when shooting. For me, the other big advantage to this series is that they are weather sealed and cold resistant. It's also one of the smallest DSLR's which is an advantage for travel and hiking.