josphy

Well, I intend to use the coordinates as an aid to the directions I already have which are in Martres's book Photographing the Southwest Vol. 1, so hopefully won't be blindly following the coordinates only to find that I'm on the edge of a 500 ft. cliff, etc. although the point is well taken. In fact, Martres has a few paragraphs on this very subject (that is, the ethics of giving out GPS coordinates with regard to 1) protection of sites and 2) safety of inexperienced GPS users).

Does anyone have GPS coordinates for False Kiva? I just got a GPS as an early

Christmas present to take on my trip to Arches/Canyonlads, and although I have

the directions to False Kiva from Martres's book, it seems a little tricky to

find. If you don't feel like posting them on here, please feel free to email

me.

Re: Green River Overlook, Martres describes the road in his book as a "good 1 1/2-mile gravel road to the large parking area", so, in the absence of snow, I think it will be navigable in my car.

 

But yeah, my plan is just to be flexible. I may eliminate/re-arrange some things depending on how the weather cooperates and so forth. I may give some of my potential lodgings a call some time this week to gauge how busy they are.

 

As to having some of these locations to myself, I guess I'll find out when I get there. I'm sort of hoping that few people will be as crazy as I am to be out there in the middle of winter. I'm sure it's safe to say there will be a lot less people than usual.

 

I'll admit that I have no experience of winter camping, but you gotta start somewhere right? I'm pretty well equipped in terms of tent, hardcore sleeping bags, etc. I just plan to exercise caution, and make sure to check with park rangers about the conditions of roads and so forth.

So with regards to the weather conditions, let's assume just a typical winter amount of snow, I probably shouldn't have any trouble reaching Moab itself (I'll be coming in from the south on 191), but that some of my destinations within the parks would probably be inaccessible?

Thanks for the info, Nancy & David. I'm a little surprised to think it would be that crowded. From everything I've read, the area is not very busy at this time of year.

 

Dead Horse Point SP is on my itinerary already -- looks like a spectacular place.

Better for infrared photography. Possibly a little lower noise.

I'm going to be traveling to the Moab, UT/Arches NP/Canyonlands NP area from

approx. Dec. 24 through January 1. I'll be driving from central Texas.

Basically, from internet research & using Photographing the Southwest as a

reference, I've come up with the following itinerary, which I think is a pretty

good balance of hitting the major attractions and also allowing time for some

R&R and exploration of Moab. In addition, I've planned for some nights camping

out (yes, I know it will be cold) and some nights in hotel. I'll also add that

I drive a Kia Rio, so any trips that require 4WD or high clearance vehicles are

not options.

 

I am having a hard time posting the itinerary on here formatted, so I made a

blog to post it on.

 

http://ebblight.blogspot.com/

 

Any thoughts, suggestions, etc. are very welcome!

I'd probably use the 300mm/4 and the 2x teleconverter. The proper exposure for the moon @ ISO 200 would be about 1/200th second @ f11.

If you want Aperture priority mode, look for A lenses, not M lenses. It's not really a problem for the slower way of working on a copy stand -- no reason not to just shoot manually.

 

And yeah those aren't macro lenses, so unless you'll be mounting them on a bellows or with some extension tubes, you won't get anywhere near 1:2. Plenty of true macro lenses out there though. Pentax 100mm/4 macro, 50mm/2.8 macro, etc.

 

Check out KEH.com for used equipment. Their "bargain" grade stuff is always in top notch condition and very good prices.

Ditto what, Alan said. It's not like there's a "right" or a "wrong" exposure in that case. It's just a question of whether you want to overpower the ambient light or you want to preserve the atmosphere and balance the exposure with the lamp.

OK so what's the question? Whether this is normal or not? If that's the question, then YES. What you're seeing is basically an otherwise dark scene with a relatively very bright spot in it -- dark room + very bright (relative to the room) lamp.

 

Film or digital sensors can only contain so much of a range of bright and dark. Sometimes you have to sacrifice one or the other. The reason the shots with flash look better and the lamp isn't blown out is because the flash is able to fill in the shadows and balance out the exposure better with the ambient light. On the other hand, the shots without flash, you have to give so much exposure to get detail in the dark areas, that the lamp ends up being blown out. If you wanted to preserve detail in the lamp, you'd have to give less exposure and then your room would go much darker. Like I said, you would have to basically sacrifice one or the other.

 

Make sense?

Yeah don't worry about it. Even if there are a few specks of stuff, it won't show up until like f11 or more. If it starts getting bad, then check out www.copperhillimages.com or google "copperhill method". There's an excellent tutorial on cleaning the sensor yourself on there and you can even order the cleaning fluid and stuff to do it yourself.

Bryan -- do you have a link to where you saw that 3rd party battery pack referenced?

1. Don't bother presoaking.

 

2. Don't rinse in between steps. Put in your developer for X amount of time. Pour it out. Pour in your stop bath (or many people just use water intead of stop bath) for X amount of time (say 30 seconds). Pour it out. Pour in your fixer. Give an appropriate amount of time (some films take a little longer than others -- maybe 4 or 5 minutes). Pour it out and rinse your film in water. At this point it is safe to take the lid off the tank. By the way, if your film has "milky" stuff on it or feels really slimey (you'll know what I mean if/when it happens -- I mean seriously SLIMEY!) then that means you didn't fix completely, in which case you just put the film back into the fixer and give it a couple more minutes. Tri-x and older style films will fix faster than newer films like TMax.

 

3. Only the temperature of the developer is critical. As long as your other chemicals and water are in the ballpark you'll be golden. I would get my developer to whatever temperature you're planning to use but just leave my other stuff at room temperature and not worry about it.

 

If I may add one final tip -- I always rinsed in just regular tap water, but I would do my final rinse using distilled water. You can buy a big jug of distilled water from grocery store or pharmacy, etc. for less than $1. It has no minerals so if you rinse with distilled water at the end (just fill the tank and slosh it around really well), you won't end up getting any drying marks when you hang up the film to dry.

 

What's Agapon?

I would just play with the Shadow/Highlight tool under Image/Adjustments -- quite a bit of shadow recovery with a pretty big tonal width, maybe a touch of highlight recovery with a small tonal width, and I'd turn the color correction off and bump up the midtone contrast a few notches.

I bought the Kalt brand K-M42 adapter from B&H, and it worked fine. A lot of people will tell you that the non-Pentax brand adapters are tricky to remove, but once you learn how to do it, it's very very easy. It costs $14.95.

Just, FYI, you'll notice the 18-55mm is usually written as 18-55mm/3.5-5.6 whenever the aperture is written out, so that tells you that the max aperture changes from 3.5-5.6 as you go through the range of the zoom. So now whenever you read about other lenses, you'll understand what that means. If you look at the Pentax 16-45mm/4 for example, you'll see just the 4 at the end, so that means that it stays constant throughout the entire range.

That's common with autofocus lenses.

If it's pitch black, then your exposure time is too short. You have the filter, you have the camera, and you don't have to pay for film -- just experiment! Keep going with increasingly longer shutter speeds until you get an image.

 

By the way, on my K100D (and every other camera I've used), most cameras can meter pretty accurately through an 89B filter (and autofocus as well), so why not just put your camera on "P" mode and see what it comes up with for aperture and shutter speed?

If darker blue skies is what you're after, maybe using a graduated ND filter would be a better solution. I did some panoramas in Big Bend, and I didn't take the time to use a grad ND, but what I did was shoot RAW and then process each shot twice -- once for sky and once for foreground -- and then used masks in photoshop to layer the two together. THEN I did the stiching using hugin and enblend.

 

Anyway that is a huge pain in the butt, but it can be done (and much more successfully than I did it too); however, I would just take the time to use a grad ND from now on and that would save so much more time in the long run.

 

Here's an example of the above:

 

http://tinyurl.com/2x3qr8

It will be fine. I had films in bulk loaders for several years under just regular storage conditions (like in a drawer or closet) and it was fine.

I wonder if they crossprocessed it in C41 chemicals by mistake? No idea what that would look like, but that sounds like a possible concern, since they asked you "c41?".

I agree that the price is WAY too high -- if you don't want to "gamble" with Ebay, consider www.KEH.com. Their prices are a little bit more, but even the gear rated as "bargain" usually looking awesome and is 100% functional. If there are any problems they have a great return policy.

 

I just checked KEH and looked the camera kits for the Bronica -- you can get a basic ETRSI kit w/ the 75mm, 120 back, prism finder and speedgrip for $176. This is graded as "bargain", but I and many others on here can guarantee you that bargain on KEH usually means more like what people describe as EX+.

 

With regards to the quality -- it will BLOW YOU AWAY. I think you are definitely headed in the right direction, but the reason to go with Bronica is because it is STUNNING QUALITY but for ROCK BOTTOM PRICES. If you pay almost $600 for it, then you are missing out on the second part of that statement.

Yeah welcome to the joy of those adapters -- that moment of panic before you learn the trick during which you think you've just ruined your $900 camera!

I've noticed that too. I also hear it if I do the sensor cleaning mode that flips the mirror up, so I don't think it's related to shake reduction.