Yesterday I went out with the P30t and took a dozen pictures of snow covered tree tops for this years HTML Christmas Card on Kodacolor 200. I discovered something quite interesting. There was half a moon in the sky. I turned the lens to infinity and discovered, to my surprise, that it was out of focus. I changed to my newer pair of specs and still it was out of focus. The lens focuses beyond infinity.
I also found it was impossible to get the tree tops - about 80 metres away - and the moon sharp at the aperture I was using - f5.6. I tried the depth of focus pre-view lever with smaller apertures and could see almost nothing. I certainly was not able to determine any DOF. Okay. So I took my pictures - one of the moon in focus just to see what it'd look like - and processed them. They were all exposed at f5.6 at either 1/250 or 1/500. The lens was - of course - clamped on a huge Manfrotto with a crank driven centre post. It was cold, about 18C below, and the camera worked perfectly for the 20 minutes I was outside. I have an idea the plastic helps. The P30t seems to be largely made of plastic while the P30 is all metal. But that one also works in the cold. The ME Super does not! The results are reasonable. The tree tops look very Christmassy and I've already made the card. The moon exposure is okay, if a bit pale. It's not easy to photograph the moon in daylight. By the way, the chemicals I used were made up on August 6 and have processed fourteen 24 exposure films. The Tetenal C-41 instructions tell that mixed solutions will last for 8 weeks and will do at most 8 films if 2 are processed at the same time. I do them one by one and I guess they mean 36 exposure films. I'm going to dump the stuff today and mix another batch. I don't want to risk an accident. I'm sure it would happen very suddenly - these things always do. Dr E D F Williams http://personal.inet.fi/cool/don.williams Author's Web Site and Photo Gallery Updated: March 30, 2002
