And now for something completely different
After our trip to the coast and the somewhat less than clear railroad photography on the way back, I finally snapped and bought some faster glass for my Pentax. I mail-orderd a 50mm/f1.4 SMC-FA lens plus a circular polarizing filter, and, after UPS took six days to deliver a "3 day select" package, it arrived in the mail today, and after I spent my lunch hour cleaning out (in the Pentax-approved puff-of-air style, which, even though it may be a good workout for the thumb and index fingers, is not the most effective way of cleaning a sensor) and setting up the lens + filter on the camera (well, and having lunch too; the big advantage, for me, of a SLR camera is that they all come with easily removable lenses, which means that it took about 5 seconds to actually physically attach the lens to the body and the filter to the lens), I was ready to attack Brooklyn Yard with camera in hand.
Taking a couple of pictures with the polarizing filter turned this way and that was interesting:
Both of these pictures were taking with the camera in full auto mode, and it's kind of interesting to see the difference. There was enough glare in the 0° position that the camera set itself to f5.6, 1/500th second, but in 90° it went down to f4.5, 1/350th second, and to make things better everything looks about as bright as it actually did this afternoon.
The 50mm lens has some redeeming characteristics of its own, of course, but the polarizer was really noticable even on the dinky little review screen on the Pentax. Yum. I may have to go out and get polarizing filters for the two zoom lenses that I got with the camera.