glen_johnson

Here's another two cents. Two bad its too late. I don't care for any of the ISO 200 slide films. I would rather push 100 one stop, or just go on and suffer through ISO 400. 50 and 100 aren't close in grain and detail. There is a big degradation when you jump to 200, but not much further change when you go on up to 400.

 

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I recently bought some of the new 200 speed emulsions to see if I would have the same feelings, and I did.

 

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Still, you'll have fun with your experiments. I will look forward to your report, but I would like to see you do some comparisons between straight 200, 100 pushed a stop, and 400. This would be more helpful for you as you decide what you want to do. If you just compare one 200 speed film to another, you will find the best 200 speed film, but you may decide that the best 200 speed film isn't that great when you compare to some of the other options that you have.

Most, if not all, of the RRS Arca Swiss style plates for lenses come with a stop too. If the plate you want doesn't come with the stop as a standard feature, you can add a stop for a small additional charge.

The Really Right Stuff catalog recommends using the Bogen 3232 swivel head modified with the Really Right Stuff Arca Swiss compatible clamp for your monopod. But, as Geoff points out, the 3232 isn't rated to handle a heavy lens. I don't know what the failure mode would be.

 

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I do know that the folks at Really Right Stuff are serious about photography, and that they do use telephoto lenses (Nikon), so their recommendation probably "works," even if Bogen doesn't rate the 3232 swivel at a high enough capacity to make one feel comfortable sticking an 8 pound package on it.

If you are intentionally going for an affect that will fall within a range of one stop, these subtle points can be captured by bracketing in half or third stop increments. The fact that this kind of thing works is what allowed us to expose slow slide emulsions without any light meter at all and still get acceptable results back in the 60's. There wasn't that much to learn. Your film was either 25, 64, or 50 (if you bought Agfachrome). Fuji wasn't important yet, and faster emulsions (like those from GAF) stunk, so no one used them.

 

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I didn't start using a meter until around 1971. Most of the slides that I shot with my Pentax H3V were decent from an exposure perpsective. I've taken a look at nearly all of them over the past several months.

 

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You are still playing with the placement of the brightness levels in the scene on the film. If you do end up with three usable slides, each with a different mood, that's great. It means that the brightness range fit the film acceptably well, with enough tolerance to allow you to slide the image up or down by a third or maybe even half a stop.

 

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In the setting where your subject is moving in and out of the light, bracketing can really screw you up. You could be overcompensating for the shot where the animal moves into the sunlight, and miss the exposure by an even greater amount. I guess that this is where autobracketing is nice to have. Still, if I were using autobracketing, I would want to set it up for correct exposure first, followed by under and then over.

 

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I know that bracketting is strongly recommended advice, and it sure fits the conventional wisdom. I just wonder how much reliance on bracketing distracts people from thinking about what they are doing and actually striving for a particular result.

 

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If you like to bracket, I'm not putting you down. I am just suggesting that there are some alternatives that some folks might like to explore.

Use of an incident meter will not guarantee that the brightness range in the scene will fit on the film. An incident meter is not a panacea. No matter which type of meter you use, you are going to have to figure out how you want to place the scene on the film.

 

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You can probably do this better with a spot meter and an understanding of the linear range of the film's sensitivity curve if you know what you're doing. The spot meter is the only type of meter that can give you an accurate assessment of the brightness range from highlight to shadow.

 

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An incident meter will get you into the ball park, and it will work nearly perfectly if the brightness range in the scene is within the range that the film can handle. In situations where the brightness range in the scene is too large for the film, bracketing (perhaps by as much as a stop) should get you a usable slide if one can be had at all. There are some scenes where the brightness range just won't fit.

 

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You won't need to bracket with an incident meter if the brightness range in the scene does fit on the film you are using. If the brightness range doesn't fit, then you will still need to consider things like fill flash, reflectors, changing your perspective, etc., and you may also wish to bracket, just to give you the option of blowing out the highlight or losing the shadow detail and deciding which you like better later, after they come back from processing..

 

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All bracketing is is an attempt to account for your uncertainty about how the brightness range in the scene matches with the range that the film can handle. It is nothing more than this.

 

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If you know what you're doiing with a spot meter and you understand the particular film emulsion that you are using, you won't have to bracket, although some people do for security. A lot of times, if you know what you're doing, the first exposure is the one that's right, and the others just make you feel more secure as you leave the sight, but aren't necessarily useful once you get the film back from processing. I find this to be true myself, and I have heard it over and over again from professional friends, and in workshops.

 

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You need to pick a meter (spot, incident, or reflected average), pick a single emulsion, and then work exclusively with that emulsion for 50 rolls or more so that it becomes second nature to work with that film. If you are reasonably bright, by the end of this exercise, you will be correctly specifying the exposure for more than 90% of the situations you encounter. You do have to pay attention to what you're doing. 50 rolls of experience with an emulsion does not guarantee that you will learn anything. You have to work deliberately. 50 rolls exposed without paying attention won't teach you any more than one roll exposed without paying attention.

 

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Some meters will operate as both reflected average and as incident. I have a Weston Master V selenium cell, and it includes an incident dome that can be attached to cover the cell. It's a great meter, and you can learn a lot about exposure by reading the manual and working with this meter for a few rolls. Some of the modern meters are probably even better. Since switching from Minolta SR-T over to EOS last year, I find myself using the spot meter in the A2E and 1N camera bodies more and more. I really like what I get by this approach, and I find that bracketting with films that I understand well generally wastes film. With new emulsions, bracketting is part of the learning process.

In another post, someone suggested that use of flash for fill when photographing bears in the wild could anger the bears, and would, at the least, draw attention to the photographer. I know that people who live and work in bear country have a lot of detailed knowledge about how to avoid problems with bears - like for example, never talking when you are in the vicinity of a bear; not because it will draw attention to you, but because the bears will get used to the sound of a human voice and be less startled by it in an emergency situation.

 

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Does anyone who has experience in the wild know whether or not fill flash would present a significant safety risk for the photographer when shooting carnivores in their natural habitate with a long telephoto? If the answer is yes, the good news is that your back pack will be lighter. :-)

Russ, the bear assignment is another job for the photographer's assistant. :-)

 

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Seriously, you do have to compromise between getting the highlights

on the water and getting the bear to look right. If you blow a MAJOR highlight, you've blown the slide. I think that, in addition to the idea of using fill flash (which is a potentially good idea if you can throw the light out there), it would also be a good idea to pick your spot for the photo, so that you can minimize the brightness range that you have to deal with. Of course, if you're shooting from a platform, you may be stuck with a single location, and you have to take what you get. Still, if you blow out the highlight on the water, worse things could happen. I believe that Philip's shot of the fighting bears was taken late in the day. It provides a really nice range of tones, included stark white water (from motion, not from sun), and beautifully exposed bears.

 

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Another observation is that Philip shot his bears on print film. You could do the same, and then you would have more exposure latitude, and you could also dodge and burn to fix the contrast range problems. You may want to attempt this in photo shop with either slides or print film.

Slide films typically have a range of 4 to 5 stops. 2 to 2.5 stops under what the meter tells you will supress that part of the image into lower part of the range (black). 2 to 2.5 stops over what the meter tells you will raise that part of the image to the top of the range (white). You may be thinking of print film, which has a much wider range (often as much as 8 stops, although some of the more recent emulsions seem to be able to span an even greater range than this).

At Sam Abell's workshop in Dayton, Sam talked about his assignment in the Galapagos for National Geographic. He said that there had been two basic problems. First of all, it was easy to get caught up in the excitement of the great subjects, and to forget about the rules of good composition. Second, some of the subjects presented real exposure challenges - like very light colored birds against very dark rocks. Of the 500 +/- rolls shot by the team working on the project, he speculated that maybe as many as 200 rolls had been totally wasted.

 

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I guess the punchline is that this is a great place for wildlife photography, but you do have to think about what you're doing to get good results. :-)

The observation that flash will allow you to freeze the action and control depth of field is good advice. I didn't mention this because of the fact that the questioner indicated an interest in a motor drive sequence. In hind sight, one good shot would be better than a motor drive sequence of bad shots. Flash can also add a catchlight, which will significantly improve the image. A strobe sequence could also be very interesting.

 

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Like Bob, I think that the hardest part of this project is setting it up. That's why I asked the question about target/bait. Off line it was pointed out that this would be a good job for the photographer's assistant. :-)

 

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The more I've wrestled with this project, the more I've come to think that you can probably only get this shot with a captive snake. When they photograph alligator strikes, they stick the camera in a plexiglass box and waive it in front of the alligator who instinctively strikes at it. This would probably work with any territorial animal in a captive setting. I don't think snakes are that territorial.

 

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You might be able to get this shot by hanging bait after setting up the right background and waiting for the snake to get hungry. As Bob points out, it will be over as quickly as it starts. If you were really serious about this shot, you could set up an optical trigger to fire the camera just as the snake breaks the plane of focus. You could leave the camera unattended with this kind of rig. A modest wide angle lens, with print film, would increase your reliability. You would have to control the image size by cropping, but you could end up with some nice results.

 

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When you stop and think about it, there aren't many good pictures of snake strikes in books, so a picture like this would seem to present a significant challenge.

Condensation occurs when you have a surface that is at a temperture below the dew point of the surrounding air. If your camera's surface termperature is higher than the dew point when you take it out of the bag, you shouldn't have trouble with condensation. If it is lower than the dew point, expect the dampness problems that you've experienced.

The moisture comes from the air. Your camera case is not air tight, and so it does not keep the mosture carrying air away from the lens. Do you use a lens cap? If not, perhaps this by itself would solve your problem.

 

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If you put the camera in an air tight plastic bag, case and all, the bag will keep the moisture carrying air away from the camera. When the moisture condenses, it will condense on the surface of the bag, instead of the on the camera.

 

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Good luck.

Stick the camera in a plastic baggie so that the dew or the rain will fall on the bag and not on the camera.

I would use Sensia RD 100, Kodak E100S, or E100SW Ektachrome. The Kodak Elite II 100 ought to be OK too. I might even go as fast as ISO 200 to pick up the extra stop for the reasons given below.

 

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You will be able to freeze the motion of the snake acceptably well if you can get your shutter speed up to 1/250th of a second, although faster speeds will be even better. You will be trading off action stopping speed against loss in depth of field, so you will have to decide the best compromise. Depth of field will be less important in the side shot, at least if you can make an accurate prediction of the plane of the snake's strike and set the focus up manually for this plane. The wider angle of the lens you will use for this shot will work in your favor as far as depth of field is concerned too.

 

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From the front, with the tele lens, depth of field will be a problem. This is a place where the modern focus tracking feature could pay off. If you use it, try to lock onto the snake's eyes. The motor drive will provide an interesting sequence here too. An alternative is to prefocus manually on a particular plane and when the snake is just ready to break that plane, fire the shutter.

 

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What are you going to use as the target/bait?

If you really want to work with these filters, you should get several strengths and colors. The best "general purpose" choice is no filter.

 

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When you branch off into filtering, especially with the graduated filters, you are deciding that you want to control the natural lighting. There is nothing "wrong" with this, but you will not likely be satisfied with just one control option.

Bob, either of the methods that you posed will "work" and can give very pleasing results. If you have an important foreground subject that viewers will react negatively to if its exposure isn't dead on, then your first idea will work best, and you may want to play around with various filter strengths to get the background to come out in the most pleasing or dramatic way.

If you want to get a decent print of something like a sunset, you really have to do your own darkroom work - and this is anything but cheap. Cibachrome starts to look quite reasonable.

 

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Another idea is to shoot the sunset on Sensia RD100 or E100S or whatever slide film you have mastered for these scenes, and shoot the print film in a second body at the same time. Swap the same lens to the second body and adjust your exposure to accomodate the difference between your print film and slide film ISO ratings. Then you will have a negative AND a slide for your processing lab to work toward.

 

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If you don't have two bodies, an interneg or cibachrome really isn't really that big a deal. I wouldn't characterize conversion of a slide to a print as "costly" in the grand scheme of the photographic hobby.

Because of the recent flooding, much of the park has been closed. The roads are in bad shape, and the road to the valley is not presently open (reports on 2/16/97).

 

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They are working to get roads and camp sites back in order. It is expected that parts of the park and some campsites will be open for Summer. Some areas won't be back to normal until at least Fall. There were news clips this past week showing international visitors being turned away from Yosemite in spite of the huge distances that they had come.

 

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If you are planning a trip to Yosemite this year, it would be a good idea to check with the US Park Service to get specific information about what roads will be open, where you will be able to camp, and the like.