photo: Trinity Alps, 2009

Actually, it’s been a little more than a year. I bought the K20D and a handful of Pentax lenses at the end of 2008, shifting over from Canon, and here it is the beginning of 2010 already.

Inspired, in part, by a recent post at Photo.net, “Life with a D300,” I thought I might jot down some of the pluses and minuses of shooting with Pentax over the relatively long haul. Too many reviews are written by people who use a camera for a few days or weeks, very part time. I’ll try to bring the perspective of someone who has used the camera, and system, full time for more than a year.

First off: Fun matters

Pentax is as different from Canon as an old Jaguar is from a Ford Taurus. Both cars will get you to where you are going, at least most of the time. But the Jaguar is cooler, more fun — and slightly less reliable than the Ford.

This is a big part of why most professionals don’t choose Pentax. There are just too many bumps in that road. Canon is boring but gets you there on time.

I am not a journalist or wedding photographer who absolutely has to get the shot. I’m a fine art photographer who gets to have fun. I don’t care so much if the autofocus gets confused or if I can’t rent a 600/4 bird lens or even find one to buy.

Pentax is fun.

What gear do I use?

Here’s a list:

• K20D digital body
• LX film body

• 16-50/2.8 DA*
• 12-24/4 DA
• 21/3.2 Ltd
• 70/2.4 Ltd
• 28/2.8 M
• 50/1.4 M
• 135/3.5 M
• 200/4 M
• 300/4 645 A* with 1.4 and 2x teleconverters (with Kmount adapter)

• 280T flash, Vivitar 285HV flash, Vivitar 2600 flash, and optical slave triggers.

(I still also have a Canon EOS3 and 20D along with two L zooms: the 100-400 and 20-35. I rarely use them.)

So how do I use it all?

Depends on where I’m going and what I’m shooting.

Let’s start with color digital on the K20D.

If I’m headed out in the evening to shoot during the local art walk — or vacationing in a city, say, or going to a party that I want to photograph — I’ll put one of the Limited lenses on the K20D and the other in a pocket. These two, the 21 and 70, are a great combination for street shooting. The 70/2.4, especially, renders gorgeous images. They’re tiny, unobtrusive, and you won’t be mistaken for a professional photographer. (That’s a good thing. I don’t want to be.)

Backpacking/hiking, especially in rotten weather or dusty conditions: the K20D with the weather-sealed 16-50. Good mid range, fast lens, and tough.

photo: Yellow-headed blackbird, 2009

Birding from the car, and elsewhere: The big 645 lens on either camera, set on a windowsill beanbag. Image quality is every bit as a good as the Canon 100-400 L zoom. Bird shots need manual focusing half the time anyway because of distracting branches. Do I shoot birds in flight? Rarely. But it can be done.

Then there’s black and white — which is most of my photography these days. And certainly all that I sell.

For shooting BW, I take the LX, with the 28 mounted, and the 135 and 50, along with a few rolls of film, spare batteries and business cards, all in a tiny LowePro Orion Mini belt pack (try that with your D300 and three lenses!). The LX may be 30+ years old, but it’s a jewel of a camera, precision machined and a joy to use.

All the Pentax gear above, less the 645 telephoto, fits nicely into a LowePro Mini Trekker for stuffing into the car for trips or hauling up a mountain trail.

What do I think of the K20D?

First off, it’s impossible to separate the camera from the Pentax lenses. The lenses are sweet: better and more interesting than anything I’ve used from Canon. The Limiteds, especially, are unmatched by any other manufacturer. They, alone, are a reason to go with and stay with Pentax.

The 16-50 zoom is dead sharp, tough and weatherproof. No complaints.

And I love the K20D. It’s well designed and intuitive. The HyperProgram and Hyper Manual modes are brilliant. No other manufacturer offers anything like them.

Except…

Pentax autofocus sucks. Period. It’s slow. It hunts. It’s noisy. Pentax fans all over the web torture reality to try to convince themselves this isn’t so. Canon, they say, is fast but inaccurate. That’s ridiculous. Pentax simply lacks competitive autofocus on its cameras.

Is this a problem for me? Occasionally. The other night while shooting photos of a lecturer at an art gallery, the camera hunted noisily back and forth so much I finally shut off autofocus and focussed manually. It worked.

Autofocus works better in trying situations if you pre focus by hand. You can adapt. But it’s irritating.

Otherwise I have few complaints and much praise for the camera.  Image files are great. I shoot RAW and process in Lightroom, which handles the Pentax files very well. Photos from the K20D have more richness and depth than shots of the same scene made on the Canon 20D, or even the 5D I owned for a brief while. (I am not an image quality freak. Pixel peeping just makes you blind and crazy. Prints from all three cameras, at 12×18, are more or less identical in quality, though the Pentax color is richer. At 20×30, you might find a difference with a magnifying glass. Who cares?)

Dust removal, via the vibrating sensor, is great and should be required by law on all digital SLRs. My 20D used to get so dirty so fast I didn’t want to shoot photos with it. The K20D sensor is always clean.

The weather sealing really works. I live in Oregon. I take the camera out in the rain all the time.

The K20D uses SD cards. That means I can slip them out of the camera and right into the built-in SD slot on my laptop. I like that.

Battery life is OK. I get about 300 shots on a charge, with plenty of chimping but not much onboard flash use. I wish the charger had a flip-out plug instead of a cord.

I haven’t used the wireless flash controller feature as I don’t own a modern Pentax flash. Sadly, there is no way to disable the preflash fired by the onboard flash, making it impossible to use to fire optical slaves unless you fork over more money for one that screens the preflash out.

I love using old Pentax lenses on the K20D. Metering is a little erratic with M lenses unless you shoot them wide open or nearly so. I almost always do, but don’t mind adjusting a bit if I stop down.

The M 50/1.4 is a great portrait lens wide open. The M 135/3.5 has a beautiful 3D look and, as a bonus, is dead cheap on the used market.

But, speaking of money…

Everything Pentax has gotten more expensive lately. Too expensive. Something to do with the Yen and with the fact more people are buying Pentax cameras and then shopping for Pentax lenses on the used market. As a result it’s really hard to find the wonderful FA and FA* lenses that were easily available 10 years ago, and when you can find them they’re ridiculously expensive.

And there are few long lenses available.

This has begun to bug me. You can’t count on being able to find, say, a 35/2 autofocus lens for Pentax without a long hunt. Since I still shoot film, I have been thinking of buying an MZ-S. But there are few lenses for it anymore.

The cheap manual lenses now are from Nikon….

The camera is, beyond any doubt, the least important element in the making of any photograph – and by far the most discussed.

Photographers argue equipment matters incessantly in a manner that would do medieval theology proud: Canon or Nikon? Hasselblad or Mamiya? Is a Tamron lens as sharp as a Sigma? How many angels can, in fact, dance on the head of a pin?

All of this, of course, is total evasion. It’s easier to make superficial distinctions about angels and their behavior than it is to live a spiritual life. It’s easier to talk about camera gear than to debate esthetics. It’s easier to blame the lens than it is to refine the photographer’s vision.

That said, though, I can obsess about gear with the best of them. I have suffered my share of Nikon lust. I have agonized over the question of changing camera systems. I have drifted through the B&H web site spinning elaborate rationalizations for spending tens of thousands of dollars on really pretty equipment, sure in my heart that it will pay for itself, somehow. (It doesn’t.)

Really, we’re talking about two separate issues here, and it’s healthier to address them separately: They are photography, and the owning of fine equipment.

If simply making interesting pictures is your goal – and isn’t that what photography is about? – practically any working equipment will do. Unless you’re practicing a specialized field, such as newspaper photojournalism or medical photography, you can take stunningly good photographs with a $50 point-and-shoot. The best advice for beginners here is short and sweet: Spend your money on film and processing, not equipment. Your photography will get much better, much faster, if you shoot a lot of pictures with a cheap camera than if you buy a premium camera and shoot only now and then. A new Nikon F5 body equals (pre-digital prices) roughly 100 rolls of processed color film, or 3,600 photographs. That’s quite an apprenticeship.

If, on the other hand, you want indulge the pleasure of owning fine camera equipment, that’s great, and a big part of me is right there with you. Just as some people love owning Jaguars, others love great cameras. The silky, jewel-like feel of a Nikon FM2N or a Pentax LX in the hand is incredibly seductive. Just don’t confuse this particular pleasure with photography. Think a more expensive camera will make you a better photographer? I know people whose photography is actually limited by the fine, expensive gear they choose to own. They can’t bear the risk that they might damage or lose that wonderful camera or lens if they take it out and use it. For me, that’s a bad trade-off. It’s also what insurance is for.

OK, you’ve stayed with me so far. Now you’re getting impatient and want me actually to answer the question: What kind of camera do you use?

For 35mm, which is roughly half nature shooting in the field and half studio work under lights, I switched in early 2002 from Pentax to Canon. This was an expensive decision, but justified solely and entirely by Canon’s miraculous image stabilized lenses, which add two full stops of hand holdability. I sold off my Pentax autofocus gear and an old and ailing Pentax LX and bought a used Canon A2E and three zooms: the 20-35 f/2.8 L; the 28-135 f/4-5.6 IS; and the 100-400 f/4-5.6 L IS.Later I added an EOS 3, which, as of 2007, with the plunge in film equipment prices, is one of the best camera deals around if bought used.

The A2E is a fine if charmless body, but it does its job. The EOS 3 is bulky but very businesslike. The three lenses are superb, and the image stabilized long zoom means you can shoot at 400mm without a tripod at, say, 1/90 second, which would otherwise result in a terribly blurred image. That makes it great for bird photography without the hassle of a giant tripod. The body and three zooms make up a good general purpose system with strengths where I need them.

My main complaint with the Canon equipment is its size and weight. One of the great virtues of Pentax is that it’s very compact; a Pentax M-series body with a 28mm lens nearly fits in your pocket. You won’t do that with the A2E, and certainly not with the EOS 3. As a result I ended up keeping three Pentax M lenses — a 28/2.8, a 50/1.4 and a 135/3.5 — and two manual bodies, a banged up but functioning K1000 and the tiny little MV, a fully auto-exposure, no-manual-override SLR body I once got for $25 at a St. Vincent de Paul store. It works beautifully and I’ve carried it in three marathons. The MV and its cousin, the MV-1, are completely unappreciated gems in the photo world, which tends to dismiss them as toys. Mine is great for encouraging uninhibited shooting, as you can’t actually adjust anything but the focus. It’s also so cheap you can’t possibly worry about it at all, as you can replace the body from KEH for the price of a good filter. Many of the photos I’ve taken with the MV are far more spontaneous as a result, and it’s a far easier camera to always have around.

So even though I’m happy with the Canon system I still use the Pentax manual cameras for casual street shooting and for fun. When I’m feeling wealthier again I’ll probably buy myself another LX, just for the sheer pleasure of holding it. (OK, I confess: I bought another LX in 2006. The lust for fine gear can be insatiable.)

Do I shoot digital? Yes I do, and I love it. I have a Canon 20D and use it almost every day. My biggest frustration with digital is the lousy prints you get from it. There is really nothing out there that comes close to touching the wonderful quality, and exceedingly long life, of a good black and white darkroom print. Someday I hope there will be.

UPDATE: Late last year I switched back to Pentax and bought a used K20D and the marvelous DA* 16-55mm/2.8 lens. Then I bought the Limited 21/3.2 and 70 2.4. I’m very happy, and the Canon gear sits untouched. I need to sell it all. That frustration with digital printing remains. I still spend time in the darkroom.

I also like medium format, and in the studio and out and about I also shoot a Pentax 645, the old manual focus variety, and use the 45/2.8, 150/3.5 and 300/4 lenses. This system has pretty much replaced my ancient Mamiya C3 twins-lens reflex, which produces 6x6cm square negatives, a quite different look and process than 35mm. This brick-like professional camera system was manufactured with six interchangeable lenses, from 55mm to 250mm. I’ve got the 65mm and the 135mm. I like the camera, but it’s a bit slow and bulky and hard for my aging eyes to focus in dim light.

Dec. 26, 2006