It’s been 3 weeks since I started touring Europe with Steve Coleman and Five Elements, as a tour manager but also as a photographer / videographer.
I’ve been working with Steve since the early 2000’s and we’ve built a strong relationship over the years. As a huge fan of his music I’ve been documenting ALL concerts I’ve been involved with since 1993, in audio and / or video format. I started with a D.A.T recorder and upgraded to various camcorder cameras over the years.
In 2008 I decide to buy my first DSLR camera, a Pentax K20D, and the kit lens. I was living in West Africa back then and I choosed Pentax mainly because of the WR quality of the camera. I’ve never been disapointed, my K20D is still taking great pictures after more than 400000 actuations!
My photography use has been mostly Concerts and Events, Macro, Portrait and Landscapes. I never shot jpegs, RAW only with Lightroom as my main software and Nik’s Silver Efex Pro for my B&W.
To make a long story short I’ve been a happy Pentax shooter for 10 years, from APSC sensor size (K5, K3) to Full Frame (K1) and I have a strong connection with the brand (you can see my Pentax gear at the end of this post).
The Pentax cameras have always been reliable and super robust in all situations (humidity, cold, hot and sandy weather) to a point where I never cared about the conditions I had to go shooting images.
The AF system, often the target of non Pentax users, was working well enough for me and my type of shooting, my only complain was that AF Fine tune calibration you had to do on every lens and every cameras. And this fine tuning drove me crazy on more than one occasion!
I’ve got only praise with Pentax cameras AND lenses, the biggest upgrade in terms of IQ for me was when I moved from APSC to FF 2 years ago. I had to invest on costly lenses though, and the file size shooting RAW only “forced” me to buy a new computer! But the image quality and the dynamic range of the Pentax K1 is worth the price if you ask me.
I’m not going into a Pros/Cons of Pentax system, all I’m saying is that is good enough for me most of the time.
But there is a few things that irritated me and I’ll list them here :
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Size and weight of a FF system (Lenses included)
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No WIFI / Bluetooth connectivity for quick file transfer
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No Tethering abilities
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File size
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Very limited video features
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Workflow around RAW files
Despite this few gripes I never really considered a switch to another brand, but that was before someone lend me a Fuji X-T20 camera a few months ago.
Before, I never ever tried a Mirrorless Camera and I was very skeptical about this EVF that everybody was bashing in Pentax Forums but surprisingly the EVF didn’t bothered me when I tried it, well, not to a point were I would just dont play with the camera.
And in fact I was really surprise by the (almost) WYSIWYG feature of such an viewfinder.
So here I am, Pentax shooter with a Fuji camera and the kit lens, a very small and capable 18-55mm /f2.8-4.
I’ll be very honest, I loved the camera design right away and the compactness factor even moved my photography to a new area: Street Photography!
It took me a few days to configure the system to my liking, a big mistake was to adapt the Fuji system to my Pentax habits!
That is wrong.
So I decided to reset to camera default and started over from there, it’s not the quickest way and you’ve got to learn and understand some new philosophy, it is also demanding for your brain because you’ve got to adapt and kill habits but it is the way to get the most out of the system.
Remember I was new to ML system, that means that I also had to learn and adapt to this new way of taking pics.
A few brain damage and days later I was enjoying this new camera so much I decided to have it with me at all time… and this got me a few great shots!