Joe Farace

Each month in this column I gather a collection of websites, sometimes with a loosely related theme. This month’s sites have little in common except an excellence of vision, proving they are not only most uncommon but the result of hard work.

May was National Photo Month, the former home of Take Your Camera to Work Day, and the month I was born, so you might say it’s a month for celebrating the art and science of making images, no matter what that medium—film or digital—may be. This month’s column features images from the U.S.A., Canada, and Slovakia, and each website and photographer showcases the joy of image making with the ability to share their work with like-minded individuals around the world, which is the main reason why photography is the universal language.

For me, the Mark II designation forever conjures up images of the classic Jaguar Mark 2 automobile, but this new Pentax DSLR may change my mind. When testing the original Pentax K-1 for Shutterbug I was impressed by its outstanding construction and image quality. That thing was built like a tank with styling reminiscent of the classic medium format Pentax 67.

In 1979 Pentax launched the ME Super as a manual focus, aperture-priority automatic SLR with an electronic focal plane shutter. It was small, light, and by all reports had excellent ergonomics. It used the by-then ubiquitous K-mount lens system and was sold successfully through '84. Fast forward to 2007 and Pentax Imaging launched the K100D Super D-SLR with a few of the...