NY Easter Sunday "Hat" Parade

I was in New York City this weekend, and had a chance to see the annual Easter Sunday "Hat" parade that takes place on 5th Avenue and 50th. The police close down the street and thousands of people come to see this annual festivity.

All images shot with the K20D and my favorite lens - the 31mm Limited. I shot in RAW at IS0 400, at apertures of f/4.5 and f.5.6. Due to the lighting conditions primarily on the subjects faces, I was using exposure compensation on most of these shots of +.5 to +1.0. All images converted from PEF in Adobe Camera Raw 4.4 and PhotoShop "as shot" and converted to JPEGs for uploading here. I did throw in one politically relevant image, and I was very impressed with the patriotic madam in the last photo, as it was a very cold day here!

2008 Pentaxian Award

While not as prestigious as the Nobel Peace Prize (smile), we decided to honor a special Pentax photographer with the 2008 Pentaxian Award. It gives me great pleasure to give this first Pentaxian award to Lance Blackburn of Australia.

Lance first coined the phrase "LBA" or Lens Buying Addiction in November 2004. As quite a few of us in marketing at Pentax USA are very active in monitoring photography forums, we really loved this phrase and have referred to it in many of our print and web campaigns for the past year. For anyone that's interested in seeing the origin of this acronym, here's the link to Lance's original post:

Lance's "LBA" Post

As Lance explained to me, he first referred to this affliction many of us have about acquiring more lenses as "Pentax Lens Buyers Anonymous" and later shortened or refined the term to simply be "Lens Buying Addiction"

In recognition of Lance's contribution, we've given him a new K20D, as pictured above. And to help ease the pain of his own struggle with "LBA", we'll be sending him the new DA* 300mm f/4.0 lens as soon as it ships.

Lance, thanks for your creativity, your passion for photography and being a true Pentaxian!