Quote from Daniel Gonzalez on March 10, 2023, 3:59 pm

Hi, it's me again!

Racing weekend ahead and a question came to my mind.

With the classic and Version II of the K3 my folders where limited to 500 pics each, which I find very very interesting as I can erase images on the go but deleting some folders. I am interested in being able to erase a part of what I have on the SD card, not the whole.

 

But on the K3-III, or on my camera, this doesn't apply. The camera creates one folder and stores there as many pictures as possible, and this is something I don't like, actually.

 

Do you guys know IF it's possible to limit the volume of images per folder in the K3-III as it used to be in the K3 and K3-II? If it's possible I'm very interested in knowing how to do so.

Thank you very much!

Quote from JBP on March 10, 2023, 4:26 pm

Quote from red5isalive on February 20, 2023, 10:10 am

First race of the season and many many many thoughts on my mind.

So I will try to put take them out of my head and write them off.

First of all I must say I primarly used the K3-III with the Pentax 150-450mm lens I also bought recently 2nd hand, and my Sigma 100-300mm f4.

I must admit that I probably don't know how to set this camera with so many diferent options in order for me to work tracking my subject. As I have tried many diferent combinations. Maybe, but I am not so sure, the best one is "priority to shutter" in every mode and also center point small, combined with the light meter in "bright compensation" is it named in english?

Why do I say so? Because I found out myself in many ocasions using diferent modes stucked trying to shoot and pressing my shutter and the camera not allowing me to do so. This is why I went all in with the shutter priority. Event thougt next thought came to mind:

 

Next thought is: I don't get images as easy as before with my regular K3 + Sigma 100-300mm f4, crisp and sharp ones even at shutter speeds of 1/125th of a second. I don't understand why not. Maybe it's the lens, but I am not sure. The lens was set to focus from 6m to infinite and at some point to do the full minimal to maximum focusing distances. Yet i did not felt that confident with it as last December.

 

Next idea: The camera (i know I was running our of batteries) using the grip (is the only way I've used it this weekend) not only stopped working. That should be normal. But it just freezed to me twice with a diferent pair of bateries. This is a problem I have had with the K3 and K3-II but I thought would not happen here.

 

One more idea: I don't know how I just changed my Colour Balance in the touch of God maybe xDD when doing something else, this is something I saw later on the next day after the races.

 

Last but not least: This thing eats my memory cards very fast. So I shoot some images and then all of a sudden the camera has slowed down to write, I thought it'd take it longer until doing this. I am not sure if it was my way of taking pictures this time (there were like 30 to 40 cars coming together) in quick fast bursts to stop and back again to quick and fast burst, or what was it.

 

And this I think is all I can remember. Overall I felt a bit frustrated due to the fact I thought with the older bodies, even slower in AF supposedly, it seemed that they nailed focus better. Even using the Sigma 100-300mm f4 in this body looked better.

 

Yet I have used the 150-450mm in the K3 Silver when testing it and it works pretty well with it.

I think I might need to reconfigure the camera, and test and fail and test and fail over and over to find the correct settings for me,

 

Will be posting some image soon when I will end up picking and editing them, so far I have like +500 images I like from Sunday alone, so I'd probably need some extra time

Thank you for reading me,

BR,

I'm not sure how I missed these posts from Feb 20 until now! First off great images, absolutely fantastic as always. 😎

As for the AF problems, I too had trouble getting sharp images at first but in my case it was needing to AF fine adjust each lens first, and in my impatience I did not do that before photographing. I have had to adjust almost every lens on my K-5, K-3, and now K-3iii. My 55-300 PLM requires -10 adjustment on the K-3iii... yikes. All my lenses require a negative adjustment on the K-3iii so I am thinking it is the camera body and I may have to send it in for adjustment at some point. It shipped in a box too large for it without any padding whatsoever, so this really is no surprise...

Once I get the AF adjusted for a lens then I get great results. For action stuff I'm typically using AF-C, SEL-M or SEL-L, release priority, TAv mode. Sometimes I will use just a single focus point. If it's something coming straight at you I find that giving the camera less options for focus points helps it keep the subject in focus better. For panning having all those points up for tracking works great. For AE Metering I've gone from using center-weighted most of the time to using multi-segment after learning that multi-segment will expose a backlit subject better than center-weighted. That seems the opposite of what you would expect but I've played with it and it's true! Highlight-weighted is a blessing sometimes too.

The shake reduction I'm still trying to figure out. Supposedly the camera will automatically toggle between regular SR and panning SR but I'm not sure if it does that 100% successfully. If my shutter speed is 1/1000 or above I've been trying to remember to turn SR off.

The buffer is small compared to a camera like the D500, so sometimes I will run into it when shooting bursts. A couple things help with that by letting the camera clear the buffer faster. I turn off ALL the image correction things (all the lens corrections, highlight correction, shadow, noise, all of it off). Those are applied even if you're shooting RAW, they go to the preview in the DNG and slow down the write speed. The other thing that helps is writing to just one card. And of course if you're willing to shoot JPEGs you can burst all day long 🤣

You may find a faster writing memory card helps too. But I'm not sure how fast the K-3iii can really write to a card in the first place, and that may be a waste of money. I've read mixed results with that. It's also tough to find a card with a known write speed, most of them only list the read speed which is irrelevant for clearing the buffer.

It has been a while since I read this but write speed was discussed and tested empirically here:

https://www.pentaxforums.com/forums/210-pentax-k-3-iii/426099-anyone-really-measured-uhs-ii-write-speed-camera.html

Quote from Daniel Gonzalez on March 10, 2023, 6:09 pm

Quote from JBP on March 10, 2023, 4:26 pm

Quote from red5isalive on February 20, 2023, 10:10 am

First race of the season and many many many thoughts on my mind.

So I will try to put take them out of my head and write them off.

First of all I must say I primarly used the K3-III with the Pentax 150-450mm lens I also bought recently 2nd hand, and my Sigma 100-300mm f4.

I must admit that I probably don't know how to set this camera with so many diferent options in order for me to work tracking my subject. As I have tried many diferent combinations. Maybe, but I am not so sure, the best one is "priority to shutter" in every mode and also center point small, combined with the light meter in "bright compensation" is it named in english?

Why do I say so? Because I found out myself in many ocasions using diferent modes stucked trying to shoot and pressing my shutter and the camera not allowing me to do so. This is why I went all in with the shutter priority. Event thougt next thought came to mind:

 

Next thought is: I don't get images as easy as before with my regular K3 + Sigma 100-300mm f4, crisp and sharp ones even at shutter speeds of 1/125th of a second. I don't understand why not. Maybe it's the lens, but I am not sure. The lens was set to focus from 6m to infinite and at some point to do the full minimal to maximum focusing distances. Yet i did not felt that confident with it as last December.

 

Next idea: The camera (i know I was running our of batteries) using the grip (is the only way I've used it this weekend) not only stopped working. That should be normal. But it just freezed to me twice with a diferent pair of bateries. This is a problem I have had with the K3 and K3-II but I thought would not happen here.

 

One more idea: I don't know how I just changed my Colour Balance in the touch of God maybe xDD when doing something else, this is something I saw later on the next day after the races.

 

Last but not least: This thing eats my memory cards very fast. So I shoot some images and then all of a sudden the camera has slowed down to write, I thought it'd take it longer until doing this. I am not sure if it was my way of taking pictures this time (there were like 30 to 40 cars coming together) in quick fast bursts to stop and back again to quick and fast burst, or what was it.

 

And this I think is all I can remember. Overall I felt a bit frustrated due to the fact I thought with the older bodies, even slower in AF supposedly, it seemed that they nailed focus better. Even using the Sigma 100-300mm f4 in this body looked better.

 

Yet I have used the 150-450mm in the K3 Silver when testing it and it works pretty well with it.

I think I might need to reconfigure the camera, and test and fail and test and fail over and over to find the correct settings for me,

 

Will be posting some image soon when I will end up picking and editing them, so far I have like +500 images I like from Sunday alone, so I'd probably need some extra time

Thank you for reading me,

BR,

I'm not sure how I missed these posts from Feb 20 until now! First off great images, absolutely fantastic as always.

As for the AF problems, I too had trouble getting sharp images at first but in my case it was needing to AF fine adjust each lens first, and in my impatience I did not do that before photographing. I have had to adjust almost every lens on my K-5, K-3, and now K-3iii. My 55-300 PLM requires -10 adjustment on the K-3iii... yikes. All my lenses require a negative adjustment on the K-3iii so I am thinking it is the camera body and I may have to send it in for adjustment at some point. It shipped in a box too large for it without any padding whatsoever, so this really is no surprise...

Once I get the AF adjusted for a lens then I get great results. For action stuff I'm typically using AF-C, SEL-M or SEL-L, release priority, TAv mode. Sometimes I will use just a single focus point. If it's something coming straight at you I find that giving the camera less options for focus points helps it keep the subject in focus better. For panning having all those points up for tracking works great. For AE Metering I've gone from using center-weighted most of the time to using multi-segment after learning that multi-segment will expose a backlit subject better than center-weighted. That seems the opposite of what you would expect but I've played with it and it's true! Highlight-weighted is a blessing sometimes too.

The shake reduction I'm still trying to figure out. Supposedly the camera will automatically toggle between regular SR and panning SR but I'm not sure if it does that 100% successfully. If my shutter speed is 1/1000 or above I've been trying to remember to turn SR off.

The buffer is small compared to a camera like the D500, so sometimes I will run into it when shooting bursts. A couple things help with that by letting the camera clear the buffer faster. I turn off ALL the image correction things (all the lens corrections, highlight correction, shadow, noise, all of it off). Those are applied even if you're shooting RAW, they go to the preview in the DNG and slow down the write speed. The other thing that helps is writing to just one card. And of course if you're willing to shoot JPEGs you can burst all day long

You may find a faster writing memory card helps too. But I'm not sure how fast the K-3iii can really write to a card in the first place, and that may be a waste of money. I've read mixed results with that. It's also tough to find a card with a known write speed, most of them only list the read speed which is irrelevant for clearing the buffer.

It has been a while since I read this but write speed was discussed and tested empirically here:

https://www.pentaxforums.com/forums/210-pentax-k-3-iii/426099-anyone-really-measured-uhs-ii-write-speed-camera.html

Thank you very much!

Those are a lot of interesting ideas I'd need to apply 🙂

 

Ah yes! The writting speeds to the Camera.

Long ago I saw that no matter the card, seemed that the K3 or K3-II's buffer's were no better than 33Mb/s or similar.

 

This is the website I found, it seems to be the best one in order to explain writting speeds

https://www.cameramemoryspeed.com/pentax-k-3-ii/fastest-sd-card-comparison-test/

 

Oh and glad you liked the images 🙂 Sorry i forgot to thank you

Quote from EckyH on March 10, 2023, 6:18 pm

Quote from red5isalive on February 20, 2023, 2:55 pm

She has beautiful eyes,

[url=https://flic.kr/p/2ohWfhK][img]https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/52700189491_7e6c5144ab_b.jpg[/img][/url][url=https://flic.kr/p/2ohWfhK]_IMG9417[/url] by [url=https://www.flickr.com/photos/red5isalive/]Daniel Gonzalez Aguilera[/url], en Flickr

This photograph is my favourite of this series: great idea, great execution - great photograph. Well done!

E.

Quote from Daniel Gonzalez on March 10, 2023, 7:44 pm

Quote from EckyH on March 10, 2023, 6:18 pm

Quote from red5isalive on February 20, 2023, 2:55 pm

She has beautiful eyes,

[url=https://flic.kr/p/2ohWfhK][img]https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/52700189491_7e6c5144ab_b.jpg[/img][/url][url=https://flic.kr/p/2ohWfhK]_IMG9417[/url] by [url=https://www.flickr.com/photos/red5isalive/]Daniel Gonzalez Aguilera[/url], en Flickr

This photograph is my favourite of this series: great idea, great execution - great photograph. Well done!

E.

Thank you very much 🙂

You probably can imagine it's not the first time I took a picture like this, but I agree that this one is one of the best ones I have done of this kind.

I must admit I have done some work on Lightroom and I have fixed/added a bit of light in her eyes in order to capture your attention when looking at it. Not much, just a subtile retouch to make it look even crispier or better.

Quote from JBP on March 10, 2023, 8:12 pm

Quote from red5isalive on March 10, 2023, 6:09 pm

Quote from JBP on March 10, 2023, 4:26 pm

Quote from red5isalive on February 20, 2023, 10:10 am

First race of the season and many many many thoughts on my mind.

So I will try to put take them out of my head and write them off.

First of all I must say I primarly used the K3-III with the Pentax 150-450mm lens I also bought recently 2nd hand, and my Sigma 100-300mm f4.

I must admit that I probably don't know how to set this camera with so many diferent options in order for me to work tracking my subject. As I have tried many diferent combinations. Maybe, but I am not so sure, the best one is "priority to shutter" in every mode and also center point small, combined with the light meter in "bright compensation" is it named in english?

Why do I say so? Because I found out myself in many ocasions using diferent modes stucked trying to shoot and pressing my shutter and the camera not allowing me to do so. This is why I went all in with the shutter priority. Event thougt next thought came to mind:

 

Next thought is: I don't get images as easy as before with my regular K3 + Sigma 100-300mm f4, crisp and sharp ones even at shutter speeds of 1/125th of a second. I don't understand why not. Maybe it's the lens, but I am not sure. The lens was set to focus from 6m to infinite and at some point to do the full minimal to maximum focusing distances. Yet i did not felt that confident with it as last December.

 

Next idea: The camera (i know I was running our of batteries) using the grip (is the only way I've used it this weekend) not only stopped working. That should be normal. But it just freezed to me twice with a diferent pair of bateries. This is a problem I have had with the K3 and K3-II but I thought would not happen here.

 

One more idea: I don't know how I just changed my Colour Balance in the touch of God maybe xDD when doing something else, this is something I saw later on the next day after the races.

 

Last but not least: This thing eats my memory cards very fast. So I shoot some images and then all of a sudden the camera has slowed down to write, I thought it'd take it longer until doing this. I am not sure if it was my way of taking pictures this time (there were like 30 to 40 cars coming together) in quick fast bursts to stop and back again to quick and fast burst, or what was it.

 

And this I think is all I can remember. Overall I felt a bit frustrated due to the fact I thought with the older bodies, even slower in AF supposedly, it seemed that they nailed focus better. Even using the Sigma 100-300mm f4 in this body looked better.

 

Yet I have used the 150-450mm in the K3 Silver when testing it and it works pretty well with it.

I think I might need to reconfigure the camera, and test and fail and test and fail over and over to find the correct settings for me,

 

Will be posting some image soon when I will end up picking and editing them, so far I have like +500 images I like from Sunday alone, so I'd probably need some extra time

Thank you for reading me,

BR,

I'm not sure how I missed these posts from Feb 20 until now! First off great images, absolutely fantastic as always.

As for the AF problems, I too had trouble getting sharp images at first but in my case it was needing to AF fine adjust each lens first, and in my impatience I did not do that before photographing. I have had to adjust almost every lens on my K-5, K-3, and now K-3iii. My 55-300 PLM requires -10 adjustment on the K-3iii... yikes. All my lenses require a negative adjustment on the K-3iii so I am thinking it is the camera body and I may have to send it in for adjustment at some point. It shipped in a box too large for it without any padding whatsoever, so this really is no surprise...

Once I get the AF adjusted for a lens then I get great results. For action stuff I'm typically using AF-C, SEL-M or SEL-L, release priority, TAv mode. Sometimes I will use just a single focus point. If it's something coming straight at you I find that giving the camera less options for focus points helps it keep the subject in focus better. For panning having all those points up for tracking works great. For AE Metering I've gone from using center-weighted most of the time to using multi-segment after learning that multi-segment will expose a backlit subject better than center-weighted. That seems the opposite of what you would expect but I've played with it and it's true! Highlight-weighted is a blessing sometimes too.

The shake reduction I'm still trying to figure out. Supposedly the camera will automatically toggle between regular SR and panning SR but I'm not sure if it does that 100% successfully. If my shutter speed is 1/1000 or above I've been trying to remember to turn SR off.

The buffer is small compared to a camera like the D500, so sometimes I will run into it when shooting bursts. A couple things help with that by letting the camera clear the buffer faster. I turn off ALL the image correction things (all the lens corrections, highlight correction, shadow, noise, all of it off). Those are applied even if you're shooting RAW, they go to the preview in the DNG and slow down the write speed. The other thing that helps is writing to just one card. And of course if you're willing to shoot JPEGs you can burst all day long

You may find a faster writing memory card helps too. But I'm not sure how fast the K-3iii can really write to a card in the first place, and that may be a waste of money. I've read mixed results with that. It's also tough to find a card with a known write speed, most of them only list the read speed which is irrelevant for clearing the buffer.

It has been a while since I read this but write speed was discussed and tested empirically here:

https://www.pentaxforums.com/forums/210-pentax-k-3-iii/426099-anyone-really-measured-uhs-ii-write-speed-camera.html

Thank you very much!

Those are a lot of interesting ideas I'd need to apply

 

Ah yes! The writting speeds to the Camera.

Long ago I saw that no matter the card, seemed that the K3 or K3-II's buffer's were no better than 33Mb/s or similar.

 

This is the website I found, it seems to be the best one in order to explain writting speeds

https://www.cameramemoryspeed.com/pentax-k-3-ii/fastest-sd-card-comparison-test/

 

Oh and glad you liked the images Sorry i forgot to thank you

You're welcome! The K-3iii is also limited in that way, meaning after a certain point it doesn't matter if the card can write faster, the camera is the limiting factor. I suppose it's like that for every camera, but the K-3iii isn't the fastest at clearing the buffer. I believe it tops out at around 90mb/s though, so a good improvement over the K-3 at least. 🙂 I haven't done any testing myself, I don't hit the buffer often. For what you do it would be frustrating having to wait for the camera to clear though.

I found the post I got that number from, it's the same thread I linked to before. I don't know if better testing has been done since or not:

https://www.pentaxforums.com/forums/210-pentax-k-3-iii/426099-anyone-really-measured-uhs-ii-write-speed-camera-2.html#post5327059

Let me know if you get it writing faster, I'm starting to shoot more wildlife so I may be running into the buffer more often myself!

Quote from Daniel Gonzalez on March 10, 2023, 10:20 pm

Quote from JBP on March 10, 2023, 8:12 pm

Quote from red5isalive on March 10, 2023, 6:09 pm

Quote from JBP on March 10, 2023, 4:26 pm

Quote from red5isalive on February 20, 2023, 10:10 am

First race of the season and many many many thoughts on my mind.

So I will try to put take them out of my head and write them off.

First of all I must say I primarly used the K3-III with the Pentax 150-450mm lens I also bought recently 2nd hand, and my Sigma 100-300mm f4.

I must admit that I probably don't know how to set this camera with so many diferent options in order for me to work tracking my subject. As I have tried many diferent combinations. Maybe, but I am not so sure, the best one is "priority to shutter" in every mode and also center point small, combined with the light meter in "bright compensation" is it named in english?

Why do I say so? Because I found out myself in many ocasions using diferent modes stucked trying to shoot and pressing my shutter and the camera not allowing me to do so. This is why I went all in with the shutter priority. Event thougt next thought came to mind:

 

Next thought is: I don't get images as easy as before with my regular K3 + Sigma 100-300mm f4, crisp and sharp ones even at shutter speeds of 1/125th of a second. I don't understand why not. Maybe it's the lens, but I am not sure. The lens was set to focus from 6m to infinite and at some point to do the full minimal to maximum focusing distances. Yet i did not felt that confident with it as last December.

 

Next idea: The camera (i know I was running our of batteries) using the grip (is the only way I've used it this weekend) not only stopped working. That should be normal. But it just freezed to me twice with a diferent pair of bateries. This is a problem I have had with the K3 and K3-II but I thought would not happen here.

 

One more idea: I don't know how I just changed my Colour Balance in the touch of God maybe xDD when doing something else, this is something I saw later on the next day after the races.

 

Last but not least: This thing eats my memory cards very fast. So I shoot some images and then all of a sudden the camera has slowed down to write, I thought it'd take it longer until doing this. I am not sure if it was my way of taking pictures this time (there were like 30 to 40 cars coming together) in quick fast bursts to stop and back again to quick and fast burst, or what was it.

 

And this I think is all I can remember. Overall I felt a bit frustrated due to the fact I thought with the older bodies, even slower in AF supposedly, it seemed that they nailed focus better. Even using the Sigma 100-300mm f4 in this body looked better.

 

Yet I have used the 150-450mm in the K3 Silver when testing it and it works pretty well with it.

I think I might need to reconfigure the camera, and test and fail and test and fail over and over to find the correct settings for me,

 

Will be posting some image soon when I will end up picking and editing them, so far I have like +500 images I like from Sunday alone, so I'd probably need some extra time

Thank you for reading me,

BR,

I'm not sure how I missed these posts from Feb 20 until now! First off great images, absolutely fantastic as always.

As for the AF problems, I too had trouble getting sharp images at first but in my case it was needing to AF fine adjust each lens first, and in my impatience I did not do that before photographing. I have had to adjust almost every lens on my K-5, K-3, and now K-3iii. My 55-300 PLM requires -10 adjustment on the K-3iii... yikes. All my lenses require a negative adjustment on the K-3iii so I am thinking it is the camera body and I may have to send it in for adjustment at some point. It shipped in a box too large for it without any padding whatsoever, so this really is no surprise...

Once I get the AF adjusted for a lens then I get great results. For action stuff I'm typically using AF-C, SEL-M or SEL-L, release priority, TAv mode. Sometimes I will use just a single focus point. If it's something coming straight at you I find that giving the camera less options for focus points helps it keep the subject in focus better. For panning having all those points up for tracking works great. For AE Metering I've gone from using center-weighted most of the time to using multi-segment after learning that multi-segment will expose a backlit subject better than center-weighted. That seems the opposite of what you would expect but I've played with it and it's true! Highlight-weighted is a blessing sometimes too.

The shake reduction I'm still trying to figure out. Supposedly the camera will automatically toggle between regular SR and panning SR but I'm not sure if it does that 100% successfully. If my shutter speed is 1/1000 or above I've been trying to remember to turn SR off.

The buffer is small compared to a camera like the D500, so sometimes I will run into it when shooting bursts. A couple things help with that by letting the camera clear the buffer faster. I turn off ALL the image correction things (all the lens corrections, highlight correction, shadow, noise, all of it off). Those are applied even if you're shooting RAW, they go to the preview in the DNG and slow down the write speed. The other thing that helps is writing to just one card. And of course if you're willing to shoot JPEGs you can burst all day long

You may find a faster writing memory card helps too. But I'm not sure how fast the K-3iii can really write to a card in the first place, and that may be a waste of money. I've read mixed results with that. It's also tough to find a card with a known write speed, most of them only list the read speed which is irrelevant for clearing the buffer.

It has been a while since I read this but write speed was discussed and tested empirically here:

https://www.pentaxforums.com/forums/210-pentax-k-3-iii/426099-anyone-really-measured-uhs-ii-write-speed-camera.html

Thank you very much!

Those are a lot of interesting ideas I'd need to apply

 

Ah yes! The writting speeds to the Camera.

Long ago I saw that no matter the card, seemed that the K3 or K3-II's buffer's were no better than 33Mb/s or similar.

 

This is the website I found, it seems to be the best one in order to explain writting speeds

https://www.cameramemoryspeed.com/pentax-k-3-ii/fastest-sd-card-comparison-test/

 

Oh and glad you liked the images Sorry i forgot to thank you

You're welcome! The K-3iii is also limited in that way, meaning after a certain point it doesn't matter if the card can write faster, the camera is the limiting factor. I suppose it's like that for every camera, but the K-3iii isn't the fastest at clearing the buffer. I believe it tops out at around 90mb/s though, so a good improvement over the K-3 at least. I haven't done any testing myself, I don't hit the buffer often. For what you do it would be frustrating having to wait for the camera to clear though.

I found the post I got that number from, it's the same thread I linked to before. I don't know if better testing has been done since or not:

https://www.pentaxforums.com/forums/210-pentax-k-3-iii/426099-anyone-really-measured-uhs-ii-write-speed-camera-2.html#post5327059

Let me know if you get it writing faster, I'm starting to shoot more wildlife so I may be running into the buffer more often myself!

When i first tested the camera out a year ago I found out that probably the buffer has improved slightly but still wasn't as quick as expected. The key factor here must be the SD cards used (or allowed to be used) in combination with a slow buffer. For me, after a burst of 30 RAW + JPG high quality the camera started to slow down and it took it a whole lap (more than a minute) to clear.

Definitelly the buffer size and the writting speeds are an issue on this model as in any other Pentax camera, where nobody has kept on eye on.

Here is where the D500 wins by far with the XQD ( i think that's the name but I can be mistaken) memory cards, that make the camera almost unstoppable. (good luck picking an image later on in editing xDD)

Quote from JBP on March 11, 2023, 12:17 am

Quote from red5isalive on March 10, 2023, 10:20 pm

Quote from JBP on March 10, 2023, 8:12 pm

Quote from red5isalive on March 10, 2023, 6:09 pm

Quote from JBP on March 10, 2023, 4:26 pm

Quote from red5isalive on February 20, 2023, 10:10 am

First race of the season and many many many thoughts on my mind.

So I will try to put take them out of my head and write them off.

First of all I must say I primarly used the K3-III with the Pentax 150-450mm lens I also bought recently 2nd hand, and my Sigma 100-300mm f4.

I must admit that I probably don't know how to set this camera with so many diferent options in order for me to work tracking my subject. As I have tried many diferent combinations. Maybe, but I am not so sure, the best one is "priority to shutter" in every mode and also center point small, combined with the light meter in "bright compensation" is it named in english?

Why do I say so? Because I found out myself in many ocasions using diferent modes stucked trying to shoot and pressing my shutter and the camera not allowing me to do so. This is why I went all in with the shutter priority. Event thougt next thought came to mind:

 

Next thought is: I don't get images as easy as before with my regular K3 + Sigma 100-300mm f4, crisp and sharp ones even at shutter speeds of 1/125th of a second. I don't understand why not. Maybe it's the lens, but I am not sure. The lens was set to focus from 6m to infinite and at some point to do the full minimal to maximum focusing distances. Yet i did not felt that confident with it as last December.

 

Next idea: The camera (i know I was running our of batteries) using the grip (is the only way I've used it this weekend) not only stopped working. That should be normal. But it just freezed to me twice with a diferent pair of bateries. This is a problem I have had with the K3 and K3-II but I thought would not happen here.

 

One more idea: I don't know how I just changed my Colour Balance in the touch of God maybe xDD when doing something else, this is something I saw later on the next day after the races.

 

Last but not least: This thing eats my memory cards very fast. So I shoot some images and then all of a sudden the camera has slowed down to write, I thought it'd take it longer until doing this. I am not sure if it was my way of taking pictures this time (there were like 30 to 40 cars coming together) in quick fast bursts to stop and back again to quick and fast burst, or what was it.

 

And this I think is all I can remember. Overall I felt a bit frustrated due to the fact I thought with the older bodies, even slower in AF supposedly, it seemed that they nailed focus better. Even using the Sigma 100-300mm f4 in this body looked better.

 

Yet I have used the 150-450mm in the K3 Silver when testing it and it works pretty well with it.

I think I might need to reconfigure the camera, and test and fail and test and fail over and over to find the correct settings for me,

 

Will be posting some image soon when I will end up picking and editing them, so far I have like +500 images I like from Sunday alone, so I'd probably need some extra time

Thank you for reading me,

BR,

I'm not sure how I missed these posts from Feb 20 until now! First off great images, absolutely fantastic as always.

As for the AF problems, I too had trouble getting sharp images at first but in my case it was needing to AF fine adjust each lens first, and in my impatience I did not do that before photographing. I have had to adjust almost every lens on my K-5, K-3, and now K-3iii. My 55-300 PLM requires -10 adjustment on the K-3iii... yikes. All my lenses require a negative adjustment on the K-3iii so I am thinking it is the camera body and I may have to send it in for adjustment at some point. It shipped in a box too large for it without any padding whatsoever, so this really is no surprise...

Once I get the AF adjusted for a lens then I get great results. For action stuff I'm typically using AF-C, SEL-M or SEL-L, release priority, TAv mode. Sometimes I will use just a single focus point. If it's something coming straight at you I find that giving the camera less options for focus points helps it keep the subject in focus better. For panning having all those points up for tracking works great. For AE Metering I've gone from using center-weighted most of the time to using multi-segment after learning that multi-segment will expose a backlit subject better than center-weighted. That seems the opposite of what you would expect but I've played with it and it's true! Highlight-weighted is a blessing sometimes too.

The shake reduction I'm still trying to figure out. Supposedly the camera will automatically toggle between regular SR and panning SR but I'm not sure if it does that 100% successfully. If my shutter speed is 1/1000 or above I've been trying to remember to turn SR off.

The buffer is small compared to a camera like the D500, so sometimes I will run into it when shooting bursts. A couple things help with that by letting the camera clear the buffer faster. I turn off ALL the image correction things (all the lens corrections, highlight correction, shadow, noise, all of it off). Those are applied even if you're shooting RAW, they go to the preview in the DNG and slow down the write speed. The other thing that helps is writing to just one card. And of course if you're willing to shoot JPEGs you can burst all day long

You may find a faster writing memory card helps too. But I'm not sure how fast the K-3iii can really write to a card in the first place, and that may be a waste of money. I've read mixed results with that. It's also tough to find a card with a known write speed, most of them only list the read speed which is irrelevant for clearing the buffer.

It has been a while since I read this but write speed was discussed and tested empirically here:

https://www.pentaxforums.com/forums/210-pentax-k-3-iii/426099-anyone-really-measured-uhs-ii-write-speed-camera.html

Thank you very much!

Those are a lot of interesting ideas I'd need to apply

 

Ah yes! The writting speeds to the Camera.

Long ago I saw that no matter the card, seemed that the K3 or K3-II's buffer's were no better than 33Mb/s or similar.

 

This is the website I found, it seems to be the best one in order to explain writting speeds

https://www.cameramemoryspeed.com/pentax-k-3-ii/fastest-sd-card-comparison-test/

 

Oh and glad you liked the images Sorry i forgot to thank you

You're welcome! The K-3iii is also limited in that way, meaning after a certain point it doesn't matter if the card can write faster, the camera is the limiting factor. I suppose it's like that for every camera, but the K-3iii isn't the fastest at clearing the buffer. I believe it tops out at around 90mb/s though, so a good improvement over the K-3 at least. I haven't done any testing myself, I don't hit the buffer often. For what you do it would be frustrating having to wait for the camera to clear though.

I found the post I got that number from, it's the same thread I linked to before. I don't know if better testing has been done since or not:

https://www.pentaxforums.com/forums/210-pentax-k-3-iii/426099-anyone-really-measured-uhs-ii-write-speed-camera-2.html#post5327059

Let me know if you get it writing faster, I'm starting to shoot more wildlife so I may be running into the buffer more often myself!

When i first tested the camera out a year ago I found out that probably the buffer has improved slightly but still wasn't as quick as expected. The key factor here must be the SD cards used (or allowed to be used) in combination with a slow buffer. For me, after a burst of 30 RAW + JPG high quality the camera started to slow down and it took it a whole lap (more than a minute) to clear.

Definitelly the buffer size and the writting speeds are an issue on this model as in any other Pentax camera, where nobody has kept on eye on.

Here is where the D500 wins by far with the XQD ( i think that's the name but I can be mistaken) memory cards, that make the camera almost unstoppable. (good luck picking an image later on in editing xDD)

Yeah the D500 has a ridiculously good buffer and write speed! I seriously considered it... it has a tilt screen also... lol

Still the K-3iii shouldn't take a minute to write 30 RAW+JPEGs. If it's taking that long to clear then I suggest getting new SD cards. You can find tests where the K-3iii clears 38 RAW images in ~12 seconds. One is here and he includes the cards used:

https://www.pentaxforums.com/forums/210-pentax-k-3-iii/426099-anyone-really-measured-uhs-ii-write-speed-camera-2.html#post5319561

I just tried this myself shooting RAW+ and mine took 17 seconds to clear 30 RAW+ files (so 30 DNG and 30 JPEG, to be clear) and 21 seconds to clear 32 RAW+ files. I was expecting it to hit the buffer at 40 files but maybe shooting RAW+ is what makes it hit the wall sooner. Still, it cleared them much faster than a minute. I'm using two "PNY 128GB Elite-X Class 10 U3 V30 SDXC" cards. They aren't the best (and in fact are super inexpensive!) but they had good reviews. I am now wondering if the buffer might clear faster with a better card but I'm not willing to buy more just yet. 😆

Quote from Daniel Gonzalez on March 14, 2023, 11:12 pm

Random thoughts about the Pentax F-DA 150-450mm compared to my all time fav lens the Sigma 100-300mm f4. A part from the weight (one is more than double than the other one). A part from the Sigma being one size, non extending (yes I like zooms to preferiable not extend).

My copy has a harsh zoom barrel that doesn't help me transitioning smooth from one lenght to another one (is not like super hard but neither super smooth). And i don't feel like happy with this. Plus the coating to make it weather sealing I hate it in hand. It's too thick. It kinda hurts at the end of the day. It doesn't help smoothing my movements.

But the worst part of it, what I HATE (yes that hard xD) is the freaking massive collar ring on this lens. Not the collar itself, but the "feet" of it. It is massively large! And that disturbs me when zooming while a car is coming towards me. With the Sigma I use one single finger to move the lens, transitioning very quick and easy from 300 to 100mms. With the Pentax this is impossible to do. You need the whole hand to move it. And this is really bad. I hate it.

I'd love to find a collar ring with a smaller "feet" on it. Like half long. So I can sneak my hand around there.
Another solution would be taking it off, but I need to have it in order to use a monopod as it's a heavy beast at 2,2Kgs + camera. Yeah. The Sigma being 800grs is no problem to hand-held it. But that massive beast, for a weak man like me, it's not something I'll do for a long time.

Okay, I just said it. xD I had to share this.