Hello everyone, I am back from my canadian mini-vacation (Montreal jazz festival and Ottawa -- I wish we had July 4th more often than once a year! ).
One thing got me curious. My main camera was MX, which has the longest metered exposure of 1s and fastest film setting 1600, which sets the limit on its low light usage. In Ottawa they have this "Light and Sound" show where they projected images and all kinds of lighting on the parliament tower, which looked quite spectacular. So I decided to give it a try. Having left my meter at home, the only thing I could do was to guess the exposure. This wasn't an "educated' guess -- more like "pick a number from 1 to N and hope for the best". I bracketed between 4s and 32s, at f/2.8 (mostly) and f/8, pancake lens, with a table top tripod (on the grass field) and a cable release, hoping that print film would give me at least one or two useable shots. To my amazement, almost *all* shots came out fine (well, I should say, passable). Yes, there was in many cases a very strong magenta cast, yes, I had to tweak the levels quite a bit, but in the end, nothing 5 minutes of Photoshop couldn't fix, and all the final scans were as good as I could only hope for. Is that a lucky coincidence? Or is night time exposure almost irrelevant (because of huge difference of brightness of lightsources, one is almost guaranteed to get "bright lights/black sky" no matter what)? Any ideas? Best, Mishka Sign up for SBC Yahoo! Dial - First Month Free http://sbc.yahoo.com - This message is from the Pentax-Discuss Mail List. To unsubscribe, go to http://www.pdml.net and follow the directions. Don't forget to visit the Pentax Users' Gallery at http://pug.komkon.org .
