Street Seattle International District - Chinatown Lunar New Year

[agentlossing]

Today we hopped on the bus and went to the international district in Seattle for some of their ongoing lunar new year festivities. There was a street market as well as a food walk involving many of the restaurants in the neighborhood, and it was quite crowded despite the intermittent rain. It was a good scenario for some street photography.

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[MiguelATF]

Great series, Andrew. I don't normally think of the K-1 as a capable "street shooter" but looking at your images has made me revise my opinion.

 

[agentlossing]

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[agentlossing]

Great series, Andrew. I don't normally think of the K-1 as a capable "street shooter" but looking at your images has made me revise my opinion.

Thanks Miguel! If you haven't seen this video from Samuel Streetlife, it's another perspective of someone who recently moved to shooting with a pretty large DSLR, the D850. He gives his reasons, which I mostly agree with.

There were enough photographers out there that I could mostly fly under the radar. A lot of Fujis, and some analogue SLRs, and a couple serious compacts (some Canon and probably RX100).

Edit: forgot the link!

 

[MiguelATF]

Thanks Miguel! If you haven't seen this video from Samuel Streetlife, it's another perspective of someone who recently moved to shooting with a pretty large DSLR, the D850. He gives his reasons, which I mostly agree with.

There were enough photographers out there that I could mostly fly under the radar. A lot of Fujis, and some analogue SLRs, and a couple serious compacts (some Canon and probably RX100).

Thanks for the recomendation of the Samuel Streetlife video, Andrew. It's entertaining - and it also makes a person remember what a great camera the Nikon D850 was...and still is. Just one other comment, about these photographs of yours-- I'm not sure if it's the camera, the lenses, the sensor, or your processing... but the colors and tonalities you are achieving are really very cool.

 

[agentlossing]

I think a lot of what you're seeing is the camera - those 36mp DNGs are something! I'm using DXO PhotoLab 5 and DeepPRIME noise reduction, since I'm shooting in TAv mode. You'll see most or all of those are shot at f6.3 and 1/200, so on an overcast day or indoors the ISO is quite high. Then, Pentax has this oft-maligned (but I think ignorantly so) noise pre-processing in the RAW files. You may be familiar with it already as I am pretty sure it was in the KP as well. It creates a sort of gentle grain in high ISO shots which seems to work in concert with DeepPRIME really well to preserve detail -- surprisingly! You'd expect a doubling up of NR treatments to degrade image quality a lot, but there's very little.

My workflow is simple enough: apply the Color Fidelity standard profile for the K-1 II, then fine-tune WB (I usually like to pick the fitting setting, like daylight, cloudy etc. but these don't always work. Yesterday's shots mostly turned out too warm in the cloudy setting so I got a bit in the weeds trying to use the dropper to pick a gray point), apply a bit of contrast, sharpening and saturation boost (just a few points on each, to recover anything lost by the vintage optics), and then conservatively apply the NR and export.

A lot of what I'm liking about these shots actually comes from the lens, too. Still really surprised at how good the IQ is from this variable aperture zoom!

 

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