Pentax K-1 Gallery: Dozens of real-world samples for your pixel-peeping pleasure
posted Thursday, May 26, 2016 at 5:48 PM EDT
A few days ago, one of the year's most exciting new cameras -- the Pentax K-1 -- landed on my desk for a review. As a Pentaxian myself, I've been waiting with barely-contained excitement to get my hands on the brand's first full-frame DSLR. (And if the flood of comments our preview received is any indication, I'm certainly not alone in that!)
Although I have quite a few lenses for my own personal Pentax K-5, the overwhelming majority were designed with a sub-frame camera in mind. Thankfully, I received some full-frame glass along with the K-1 body: The brand-new HD D FA 28-105mm f/3.5-5.6ED DC WR zoom and the venerable smc FA 43mm f/1.9 Limited prime. I'm currently attempting to lay my hands on some more full-frame glass, but in the meantime I also have plenty of APS-C optics which I can also use in the K-1's cropped mode. (Or in full-frame mode for those which have a suitably-large image circle.)
For my first real shoot with the Pentax K-1, I grabbed my full-frame glass and headed to nearby downtown Knoxville for a golden hour shoot as the sun ducked below the horizon. Sadly, some low clouds in the distance robbed me of golden hour's peak, but I nevertheless came away with a good selection of shots I was happy with. You can see a selection of a couple of dozen of these in the just-published first installment of my Pentax K-1 gallery.
And along with the images from this shoot, I've also included a quick portrait of my son shot previously on one of the rare few full-frame lenses that I own myself, too -- the smc FA Macro 100mm f/2.8. Admittedly it's an older 1990s-era optic, but I think it acquitted itself pretty well. Sadly, I had missed enabling raw capture for this shot, but raws are provided for all other shots in this gallery, which span the gamut from ISO 200 to 25,600-equivalents.
Of course, there's plenty more still to come. Everything thus far has intentionally been shot handheld, to get a feel for what it's like shooting with the Pentax K-1 in gradually lessening light. I'll be doing some shooting with a tripod soon to see how long exposures look. I'm also planning to shoot at even higher sensitivities, test out cropped shooting with subframe lenses, and give the Pixel Shift Resolution mode a spin, among other things. All of that's still to come, though. In the meantime, check out my Pentax K-1 gallery to see how this beauty has been performing so far!
