I went for a photo walk on Saturday. This is the infamous "I finished my five year old roll of film" day... and I had taken my MX and also decided to take what I had gotten once as a curiosity but has become a backup body for when I finally get a service vendor to care about setting me up for the two things I need to get dealt with.
The Pentax K-01 is the also-ran mirrorless camera they built with designer Marc Newson, and the ergonomics definitely show the result of being done by a designer, not a photographer. The camera isn't difficult to use by any stretch of the imagination, but there are a number of things about it that make you want to just set it to auto and not do much. Also, since it uses the K-mount, the registration distance is still 45.46mm, so the camera isn't really much smaller than a standard SLR. It's quite a bit lighter, though, which is nice.
Anyway, since I don't use this camera all that much, I went out without checking on its settings (or indeed even verifying that the memory card I grabbed was any good or had any room on it). It was kind of liberating to just grab something and go... but it turned out that the camera was set to JPEG mode, not raw. For those that don't live in this world, the two things you lose out on are some fine pixel detail and then the detail at the brightest and darkest parts of the image. Basically, imagine a chart of brightnesses from 0 to 100; let's say the image shows us from 20 to 80. With a raw file, there's some additional detail in the parts of the image we can't see, and with editing software, you can change the brightnesses to let you see some of that additional detail.
So it's been a rough week outside the camera world... sick cat at home, work going through a dumb patch with new inventory policies, just generally having some wintertime funk. Imagine my disappointment when I got home and found that I couldn't do what I wanted with my digital pictures. I don't have much to share from that day specifically, nor can I say any of the images that were still on this random card from this specific camera with these specific settings that I took back in 2018 were worth keeping around. But I decided to tell my story and post some of them on a discussion forum populated by other middle-aged computer touchers, and they actually really liked what I was able to eke out of this frame. As I told them: it's good to remember that with artistic works, other people can look at your stuff and see past the internal limitations you see in your own work. I guess sometimes if you knowingly publish work below your usual standard, you might find that some of your voice and expertise still shine through. Honest process, honest feedback.
