lighting and stuff

[lynn_oatman]

I have a pentax k-1000 camera and a big problem. Last week I went

down to the local lake shore to take some pix and experiment with my

camera. I have some photos that did not come out, and they were all

taken with the lake and the lowering sky in the background. Can

you send me in a direction that might help me? I've got the

book 'exposure'...and my major problem is that beyond a certain point

I don't understans.

 

thanks<div></div>

[stemked]

Hi Lynn.

 

To begin with this would be a very difficult image to accurately expose as you have taken it the sky is so bright and your near ground is so dark that unless you use a ND gradient filter you will either overexpose the sky or underexpose the near ground.

 

 

That not with-standing you still have a problem. Do you see the same problem in all your shots? Do you see the same thing in your negative (if you are using print film?). If the answer is 'yes' the fact that you have an odd dark square area in the image almost looks to me like the kind of problems one sees when one shoots with a flash gun at a shutter speed that is faster than the sync speed. I don't recall what the flash sync is with the K1000 (1/60th?) but if you use a flash and then set the camera to 1/125th or 1/250th, etc. you will get a similar problem. I don't know how that might reflect what I'm seeing in the image, but it sure looks similar. Maybe someone else can help.

[lynn_oatman]

nope, actually the only photos I had a problem with were the ones taken facing toward the lake/sun (what little there was that day)

 

No flash yet. Trying to learn the ins and outs of the camera before I attempt flash.

[bruce_rubenstein]

The shutter in your camera needs to be looked at, because it is not working right. At any shutter speed faster than 1/60 sec., there is a slit, formed by the two shutter curtains, traveling across the film plane. The width of the slit is changing as it travles, and it shouldn't. When it is smaller, less light strikes the film and causes the dark area. If you notice, the sky and foreground are both dark on one side of the frame. The term for this malfunction is called shutter capping.

[lynn_oatman]

thanks, Bruce. Took my camera and the above photo to North Plaza Camera (the only people I would ever trust with my camera) and they told me indeed the shutter was 'out of time'. They fixed it, cleaned it etc. The whole deal cost me 60 bucks total. Only problem is, now I have no excuse for taking bad photos.