Blog mioojo

I saw this morning that DP Review have posted their anticipated Pentax K5 review. Sample shots from the K5 were included in their recent Nikon D7000 review and so there's no real surprises. The K5 enjoys the benefits of an almost identical body to the K7, but while that camera is let down by its high ISO performance, the K5 is as good any APS-C DSLR currently available and arguably the current class leader in terms of image quality.

This morning Mioojo took one little step forward with its first sale. I'm still in the process of developing this site for ecommerce, but have opened a CafePress shop to offer some of the our photos on a range of different products.

This first sale was printed with Rudolph the Red Nosed Snail, which is also available from this site as a free wallpaper download. While it's only one sale, a journey of a 1,000 miles starts with a single step. Fingers crossed this isn't a journey of one step.

DP Review have just updated their Canon 60D review with comparison images across the ISO range from the Nikon D7000 and Pentax K5.

There's not a bad performance from any of them, but what is interesting and, as a Pentax owner, encouraging is how well the K5 performs in terms of noise control. The K7 is a great camera but is a little weak in this respect against its contemporaries. It's not too great an issue as long as you're aware of it, as in many situations you can work around it.

However in some cases, you can't increase the light or use a longer exposure and in those situations the K7 did lose out to the 50D and D90 in JPEG output, though the differences weren't so marked in RAW.

Comparing images side by side is a little subjective, but to my eye the K5 certainly holds it own in the company of the latest prosumer DSLRs. As with the K7, I think the K5 employs a little less noise reduction, certainly in the low to mid range, which means slightly sharper but slightly noisier images.

The 60D tops out at ISO 12800 and it's hard to imagine many occasions when you'd want to use any of these cameras at that setting. Still it gives options to photographers and interestingly at this level, slight chroma noise is starting to appear in the dark areas of both the 60D and D7000. The K5 though appears devoid of chroma noise, certainly on this monitor, though it appears to be employing more noise reduction that has softened the image a little.

At ISO 25600, the K5 still appears immune to chroma noise and while softer, to my eye is producing the better image, though its largely academic at this level. The K5 still has another stop with a max setting at ISO 51200 and only at this level am I starting to see the appearance of chroma noise in among the luminance noise.

The test is run under very good conditions, but it's nice to see the K5 putting such a good performance. On the strength of these test images, though, which ever of these three cameras you choose, you're not going to be disappointed with their noise performance.

A free wallpaper from mioojo has been featured in Smashing Magazine's November round up of wallpapers. You can see all of the free wallpapers on offer at Desktop Wallpaper Calendar: November 2010 and download a free copy of Racing Incident for your own computer.

I recently found the newish Photography Wonder website mentioned over on Brian Auer's Epic Edits blog.

It's quite a new site so time will tell if it becomes established, but the premise is that users can ask and respond to questions. In that way it's a little more focused than a forum with each post being a specific query.

I was interested in one posted yesterday that asked whether users have their own personal style. I can see the attraction of producing work that is obviously yours, but it is something that I've tried hard to avoid over the year or so that I've been building towards mioojo. Perhaps in the future it is a luxury that I will allow myself, but for the time being, I'll continue trying to shoot an eclectic range of work and process in different styles, in the hope that I'll continue learning.

Did you know about Flying Ant Day? I certainly didn't and while I always think that you should be a little careful about things you read on Wikipedia, I'm happy to accept this as genuine 100% fact.

I'm wittering on this topic as today was Flying Ant Day here in Villagarcia and unlike past years when I've noticed large numbers of flying ants suddenly appear, I actually thought to find out a little more about flying ants.

I also took the opportunity to try and photograph them. Unfortunately they don't stay still. They also appear to be very bad at flying, which is rather unfortunate for a creature with the word 'flying' in its name, and they spent an innumerable amount of time trying to take off. At least I'm assuming that they were trying to take off. I can't believe that they were all deliberately flipping themselves over onto their backs and then struggling to right themselves.

Later on today, I noticed that some opportunistic ants had decided to pick off some of the make flying ants and take them home for a meal, but not in the friendly context. This reminded me of a day earlier this year when I witnessed one ant colony being devastated by an attack from another colony. As I watched the event unfold in miniature before my macro lens, I didn't appreciate just how gruesome and horrific it really was. You can see the full Two Tribes set at my Flickr account and I know that this will be the closest I ever get to war photography.