I hate my *ist D. I stayed up until 5:15 AM taking eclipse photos. The first several within 20 minutes of when the eclipse started look OK, though that was not the fabulous part of the evening(morning). However, the camera quickly became noisy (electronic noise), even at short exposures ISO 400 and 1/500 sec. All with Tokina 500 f/8 mirror lens.
Of course it was at its absolute worst during totality. One shot for some reason was less noisy than the others, though still ruined by noise (next to the last as presented). http://photo.net/photodb/presentation.tcl?presentation_id=355756 Most shots looked good on the LCD, even when magnified to check focus, with orange hues and turquoise tones at the edge of earths shadow. All lost to noise. Some taken during totality didn't make muster because 8 - 10 sec exposures were too long and exhibited too much tracking across the frame. I'm not sure if I have a hardware problem with the camera... may be time to throw it in the trash. I've taken other aurora shots with the same body that were virtually noise free at exposures of 15 - 20 seconds. The newer *ist DS with less than 1000 shots on it was even worse, however, at ISO 800 and 2 secs. Images (not shown here) were absolutely obliterated. Looked like a Photoshop effect. Still amazing to watch. Tom C. -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net
