PhotographyBanzai.com

I just made a second promo video for an Android application called DSLR Star Trails Calculator that I just completed yesterday. It’s a simple yet useful application to give estimates on how to avoid or gain star trails in photos. This application is under my personal business of sorts with a focus on photography. I’ve been wanting to make simple but useful applications that I can utilize in the field to get the shots I want to make. Here is the video: The promo video on YouTube. This was taken with the K-7 at 1536×1024 in 30fps mode (My K-5 is being serviced). That’s one of the reasons I love blogging because I make tutorials like that, which allows me to just follow my previous directions to get a result I’m after. If I had not written down directions I probably would have spend extra time on this video trying to remember what the specific steps were. Even if you don’t write for a blog like I do, you should start writing down important processes somewhere. It helps you stay consi...

So you might be thinking to yourself that a camera with GPS isn’t something new. The really interesting stuff comes with some detail about the accessory, which I’ll go over below. Here is what it will look like (Pentax stock image): Important features to me: – Weather resistant construction to go along with the K-5 and presumably a DA* lens. – Astrotracer!!! This is a seriously amazing feature if it works as advertised. It is said to use the GPS, camera orientation sensors, and the shake-reduction mechanism inside the camera to do astro-tracking of stars. This should allow the camera to have longer exposure times before star trails start showing up. If this feature works as advertised I will seriously consider picking one up. – It will of course have the standard GPS camera features like GEO tagging too. It doesn’t really say if the information will be written into the EXIF or not, so we will have to see about that. Another cool feature is simple navigation to destinations. I’m liking ...

Astrophotography has always been one of those areas that I’ve wanted to spend time on but rarely have. I always thought the cost of entry was really high (it can be) and the time of day best to take photos has been prohibitive. Forgoing the advanced methods and tools, I have put some time into the subject…  My first attempt in recent memory was in May 2010, which resulted in images like this: I was primarily using a 10-17mm Fisheye lens due to the large field of view it provides. The nice thing about using a wide angle lens in astrophotography as it’s quite east to avoid having stars blur due to the Earth’s rotation. Eventually I plan on trying my newer rectilinear 14mm prime instead of the 10-17mm Fisheye. More recently I had a short amount of time to connect my camera to a large refracting telescope at an observatory here in my home city resulting in this image of Jupiter: Image from a 10 inch Astro-Physics, Inc. refracting telescope with a Pentax *ist DS and a T-mount adapte...