Pentax Q10 – Hands On

I had a recent trip to Inverness with my work and decided rather than take a lump of a DSLR  I would take my Pentax Q10 and give it a test and see how it performed. I purchased this camera mainly for doing Time Lapses and also for capturing wildlife in the distance using and adapter to fit my EF lenses, but got to admit I don’t really like having to focus manually for the wildlife as there are too many missed shots when they move.

Anyway my trip to Inverness started off waiting for the ferry, after I collected my tickets I headed outside I noticed the sun was

Waiting For The Ferry

about to rise so I quickly snapped this shot. I wasn’t sure how the camera would handle the dynamic range but it seems to have

done a decent job, I personally like items being silhouetted in a sunrise/sunset image so I wasn’t looking for much detail in the darks but it did a decent job of retaining the details in the pier and at least the highlights aren’t totally blown out all over the place.

Leaving The Port

As the ferry pulled out of the Port I couldn’t resist getting shot of us leaving, using the trail of the ferry in the water as a lead in line back to the Port. Edited in Black & White to contrast the foam in the trail a bit more to draw the viewers eye to it.

As we were well on our way the the white winter was still leaving it’s

Snow Covered Hill Tops

mark on the hills, it was at this point I started to wish I had the DSLR with me with a bigger zoom, as the Pentax only had a 5-15mm lens on it…doh

I had made it to the mainland before I took my next shot, but I wish I

Ballachulish Hotel View

had stopped a few times before en route as there were so many photographic opportunities, however I wasn’t wanting to ask my colleague to stop every time I seen a nice shot, otherwise we would never have got there in time! We stopped at Ballachulish Hotel to take in this stunning vista, another White Winter’s scene with the hills covered in thick snow entered into Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge, so give her a visit by clicking the link.

I had stopped at the Royal Marine Commando memorial and taken some shots from there, but that’s where things went a bit wrong, the Q10  has a dial on the front of that sets the camera to different presets and at some point I must have changed it

Robin

on to a preset that put a green filter (as this camera has built in filters) through the image plus it also added to my exposure,

which wasn’t good as I was already exposing to the right, and in a snowy scene all my highlights then overexposed so I lost all my images from here, a little annoyed as I had done a few of the monument and a panoramic of the mountain range. One image I did get there was this little fella, perched on a handrail post and extremely comfy with me stick my camera about 3 inches away from his bill, hence the scale of him compared to the background.

Finally when in Inverness I had a little walk around but didn’t really

Inverness Castle

photograph much as again I would have preferred my DSLR to have done some Long Exposures but I did get a shot of the Castle, and as I thought with me being so close with the lens at 5mm there is a lot of distortion going on, easily fixed in post but I left it as is to show you and also it would have cropped out too much of the castle for my liking.

So overall I’m really impress with this little camera. For it’s size it fair punches above it’s weight in my opinion. 12MP, interchangeable lenses, shoots in RAW, Inbuilt filters (colour or ND), HDR Shooting, inbuilt intervalometer, 1080p video and more…well worth the money.