CAMERA STORES SYDNEY

Food Lovers' Guide to San Francisco: The Best Restaurants, Markets & Local Culinary Offerings (Food Lovers' Series)

The ultimate guide to the San Francisco and the East Bay's food scene provides the inside scoop on the best places to find, enjoy, and celebrate local culinary offerings. Written for residents and visitors alike to find producers and purveyors of tasty local specialties, as well as a rich array of other, indispensable food-related information including: food festivals and culinary events; specialty food shops; farmers’ markets and farm stands; trendy restaurants and time-tested iconic landmarks; and recipes using local ingredients and traditions.

This is my newest purchase from KEH, a Pentax 6x7 medium format camera. I've wanted one of these for a while; I wanted my first medium format camera to work for the sort of shooting I do -- meaning that I wanted something that I could use at least some of the time like a big 35mm SLR, but that I could also do close-up work with without having to worry about parallax correction, etc.

I also -- after reviewing a lot of images made with a lot of different cameras -- decided I really wanted a 6x7 format camera. I like what I've seen shot on 6x7, particularly with the Pentax and 105mm f/2.4 lens. (Mmm. Bokeh.)

I also like the idea of 6x7 -- I've always been frustrated with the aspect ratio of 35mm film and APS-C digital SLRs, and I like the idea of being able to print without cropping on normal shaped paper.

There are other 6x7 options, of course. A rangefinder (like the insanely expensive Mamiya 7 or the awesomely cool and much more affordable, but less portable, Koni Omega) would obviously be better for handheld street shooting on the go. But, as I've discovered with my Olympus XA, I find rangefinders very limiting in two regards -- lack of close focusing and inability to confirm focus across the whole viewfinder area.

if I were just doing macro and other tripod-centric work, a Mamiya RB67 or RZ67 would be a no-brainer. But I don't carry my tripod all the time, and I don't think I could cope with handholding something as unwieldy as an RB67.

The Pentax doesn't excel in either area, but I believe it can be made to do. I believe I can also live with its two key weaknesses -- lack of interchangeable backs and slow flash sync. I rarely use flash and I can deal with shooting one roll at a time.

So, it seems like a good fit. And I really, really like the camera. It's a behemoth, but a charming one, and I think I can learn to handle it adequately -- especially because I don't mind shooting fast film with a bit of grain, which should let me attain workable shutter speeds even with my hands. After all, it's not much (if at all) heavier than my Nikkormat+300mm f/4.5, and it's not such a narrower field of view. I've gotten workable handheld shots with that combo.

It's also really, really fun to hold and shoot. The mirror slap is *hilarious*. I probably won't feel that way once I look at the shake in my first couple rolls, of course, but for now it's really funny to watch how people and housecats respond to it going off.

Unfortunately, the camera may not actually be fully functional. It's had some serious problems with the mirror. It's possible these may just largely battery-related (I was using taped SR44's, rather than a single 4SR44), and if that's the case, I've got them fixed. (Bought an appropriate battery.) If there's much more to it than that, I'll know later this weekend, and then I'll have to be on the phone to KEH on monday to send it back and hopefully get a more functional replacement. (::sigh::)

Also, I'm a bit concerned that if I do start shooting regularly with one of these puppies, my left forearm may become overdeveloped relative to my right forearm and the rest of my body, like the guy in Lady in the Water...

Pentax K-x with Ricoh Rikenon P 28-100mm F4 Macro Zoom Lens. Photo taken with a Pentax K100D and SMC Pentax-A 80-200mm F4.7-5.6 Zoom.

Like many of my gear shots, I have a story with this one. This lens surprised the hell out of me. I have a Rikenon P 50mm F1.7 lens that I love. But this 28-100mm zoom doesn't seem to have much of a following at all. I was buying myself an SMC Pentax-A 24-50mm F4 lens from KEH in EX at $139. As I often do when making a purchase from KEH, I troll around looking for cheap lenses and accessories that can take a ride with the shipping I'm already paying for the order. I came across this lens at $25. I thought, if it's good, it could be a great walk around manual focus lens. But research turned up little info and the few mentions I found provided mixed reviews. But what the heck - it was only $25. Well guess what... I returned the Pentax 24-50mm F4 lens because the image quality was sub-par. But this one is a keeper, IMHO. The next couple posts in my stream were taken with this lens/camera combo.

Webster's bibliographic and event-based timelines are comprehensive in scope, covering virtually all topics, geographic locations and people. They do so from a linguistic point of view, and in the case of this book, the focus is on "Keh," including when used in literature (e.g. all authors that might have Keh in their name). As such, this book represents the largest compilation of timeline events associated with Keh when it is used in proper noun form. Webster's timelines cover bibliographic citations, patented inventions, as well as non-conventional and alternative meanings which capture ambiguities in usage. These furthermore cover all parts of speech (possessive, institutional usage, geographic usage) and contexts, including pop culture, the arts, social sciences (linguistics, history, geography, economics, sociology, political science), business, computer science, literature, law, medicine, psychology, mathematics, chemistry, physics, biology and other physical sciences. This "data dump" results in a comprehensive set of entries for a bibliographic and/or event-based timeline on the proper name Keh, since editorial decisions to include or exclude events is purely a linguistic process. The resulting entries are used under license or with permission, used under "fair use" conditions, used in agreement with the original authors, or are in the public domain.