knut_sverre_horn

I'd like to sew my own beanbag, as I can't find any on the Norwegian

market and shipping costs alone would probably exceed the cost of the

materials needed. But what should I fill it with?

Cheers from Varanger Peninsula

Don't know about Cromatek (I use Lee myself), so let me answer your last question: You will need both 1, 2 and 3 stop ND grads, depending on what you shoot. A sunlit mountain mirroring in a lake would typically require a 1-stop filter, while a 3-stop is more adequate when you want sunsets with details in the foreground. Your spot meter (or a telephoto lens and center-weight metering) gives you an idea of the contrasts in the picture. Then it takes some experience to know how much you want to compensate. (After all, a picture does consist of contrasts, overcompensating ruins your shot.)

Make sure, though, that the filters you buy let you position the filter where you want it. Lee filters are 10x15 cm, and thus gives you a lot of freedom in that respect.

:-)

Ad "being battery-independent "except for the meter" isn't all that big a help": It sure is if you have som rolls of negative film as back-up, if you shoot e.g. aurora borealis, if you shoot scenics and have the time to bracket like hell, if you have one of those cheap hand-held battery-independent meters (they still exist, I believe), if one of your travel companions still have batteries and can meter the light... and so on. Not to mention that the batteries needed for the meter in a camera like FM2 are so small you could bring a dozen without any significant increase in bulk & weight.

Knut-Sverre

I think the 2nd of the Pauls is perfectly right. Newer Nikons like F90/N90 and F5 (but not F4, according to some) are said to work very well in freezing cold in the Spitzbergen archipelago. So did the FM2 and FE2 as well, I've been told, but they are obviously not so well sealed. However, they don't consume that much power, and thus are better cameras in the Arctic if the PHOTOGRAPHER isn't to reliable... Then again, people who buy the high-end Nikons and Canons (I'm one of them) are not likely to admit they wasted money on e piece of... well, garbage, so take everything we say with the appropriate grain of salt. :-)

Think I'm gonna buy a Sachtler tripod, since my Manfrotto 055 turns

out to be not very helpful when shooting with 300 + 2x TC. Have any of

you got any experience with the Sachtler S14 long? :-) Knut-Sverre

There's yet another point to be considered here: Movements from the mirror. If your camera does not have a mirror lock-up feature, the mirror may cause some shaking in your camera that affects the image quality adversely. Some shutter speeds are more sensible in this regard than others; it may actually be better to shoot at 2 to 1/2 a second than on 1/15, 1/30 or maybe even 1/60. Assuming you don't carry along different grey filters, you may be better off stopping the lens down to get a longer exposure time, EVEN IF this gives you a bit more diffraction. Why not perform your own test? Shoot indoors with a powerful flash to find out how much your lens will suffer from diffraction on different f-stops, then shoot at different shutter speeds to find out if the mirror causes a slight blur.

(I would not use my own Nikkor 300 f2,8 stopped down to 22 or 32, except maybe for panned pictures. The sharpness declines from f 8.)

No matter what lens you buy, you will always want "that little bit extra of reach". Here's my advice: Go for something shorter and lighter than a 600 f4, which IMHO is to awkward to operate. The 500 f4 is reported to make an unbeatable combo with the 1,4 TC, the new light-weight 400 f2,8 partly made from carbon is the lens of my wet dreams, although I am actually quite happy with my 300 f2,8 and converters. You should of course get the longer lenses if you want extreme close-ups of tiny warblers with the background thrown way out of focus, but haven't we already seen enough of these boring portraits? If it takes a 600 to make a bird fill the frame, it takes a 300 to fill the frame with to birds fighting. Why not go for the fight and the (inter)action, and why not include some of the bird's environment?

In stead of wasting money on those all-to-long-and-heavy lenses, spend some extra time on thorough research, make a couple of permanent blinds near your home and get yourself some mobile blind as well. That will do the trick!

Hey, if you REALLY want your pictures to stand out from the ordinary, forget the telephoto lenses, get some cheap remote controle device meant for model airplanes, invent some DIY-coupling to make it release yor camera and take your photos with a wide-angle! Takes some patience, though�

Knut-Sverre Horn, Norway

Graduated grey and a warm-up seems an excellent advise. Never travel without a polarizer, though! I am satisfied with Lee myself. They probably scratch a little more easy than glass, but you have to look after your filters extremely carefully in an environment full of sand anyway, so maybe it doesn't make that much of a difference? The important thing is that yoy can move the graduated filter vertically in its holder, positioning the graduation exactly where you want it and not just in the middle.

:-) Knut-Sverre Horn, Norway