The Gear Acquisition Syndrome has taken hold. Looking at my options for something with a slightly nicer sensor than the 1Dx Mark II, my options were another 1Dx II, an expensive 1Dx Mark III, or jump over to another system. Well, the Pentax 645 medium format DSLRs caught my eye. Although a bit old, and it has some limitations, the 645D was actually on par for what I paid for the 1Dx Mark II. Basically, a used 1Dx Mark III, just the body, will run about the same as a new Pentax 645Z with a lens. So I purchased a used 645D and a pile of lenses. Even bought one of the lenses new because they were on sale.
Why Pentax? Well, as mentioned, the price is good. Pentax is committed to making DSLRs and avoiding mirrorless. More importantly, though, Pentax glass is good. Even their cheap lenses are great. The lenses are rugged. Also, most are available for not much money on the used market.
Now, it should be obvious I’m going to be posting more photos, but I don’t necessarily want to overload this blog with photo posts. With that in mind, I went ahead and grabbed a new domain for this purpose. The site, havardphoto.com, is now live. The galleries that are here now will be moved over to the new site over the next week. I’ll keep the blog over here, even for the photography-related posts.
The featured image was shot on the 1Dx Mark II. That dude decided to see what I was doing while packing up my strobes in the travel case, and then proceeded to eat the berries off a tree for several minutes while I snapped away with the camera. The raw files were processed in DxO PhotoLab 6, then passed into DxO FilmPack 6 to give it a bit more character.