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T M
{K:-183} 10/5/2002
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Hallo Wietse.
I?m not sure if using slide film for long-time exposures makes it easier to get a good picture: slide film covers a smaller range of contrast than print film. Because of the richer colours of slides I?d encourage you to try it but you?ll need to take a lot of care with exposure under difficult lighting conditions. (After I changed from prints to slides I personally blew serveral rolls of film until I got the first picture that looked like I wanted it to look - but now I?ve fallen in love with slides)
Judging from what I learned from long-time exposures this might prove helpful: Set the camera to manual exposure and to spot-metering. Then determine the exposure for the snow. As Russ sugested the camera will automatically set the brightness to a point halway between white and black (if you look at the greyscale on the bottom of this page the snow would look like zone V). That way you?d get the snow to look darker and the sky will automatically follow (and turn nearly black). If V ist too dark for you you can easily correct this by choosing a longer exposure time (say 20 or 30 seconds instead of 10) or a bigger aperture (eg. f8 or f11 instead of f22). What Terrence said about bracketing - this is surely a good idea, too.
I?m not sure if your photo suffers from reciprocity failure. As far as I know this effect means that when you use very long or very short exposure times (above one minute or below 1/2000 or so) the picture turns out darker than it should - something which did not happen in your case.
Something else that came to my mind while reading the comments: I don?t know if a technically perfect exposed picture (one with dark snow and dark sky) is always the best possible solution. It?s surely one good solution as it tries to get close to reality and I believe your photo would look interesting as well in that exposure. But hey - I had a closer look at your pic because it puzzled me: A scene that nearly looked like daylight but the lights in all the houses were on.... (plus the strange colours) That caught my attention. After all, it?s a quesion of taste but I believe there?s always serveral possible solutions.
Good pic and good luck. :)
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Russ Cooper
{K:759} 9/23/2002
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Some of us were discussing this photograph in the interactive chat, and a couple of the guys say your photo suffers from "reciprocity failure". I don't have a clue what that means, but somebody suggested this website:
http://users.erols.com/astrogph/color_rt.htm
Again, good luck ... this maybe more difficult than I thought, anyway.
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Wietse de Graaf
{K:136} 9/22/2002
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I see. Well, here are the things I plan to do differently next time:
- Use wide angle (28 vs 75 this time)
- Slides (probably Astia or Velvia)
- setting F22, make a couple of shots with different shutter speeds.
more suggestions?
Thanks so far!
Wietse
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Russ Cooper
{K:759} 9/22/2002
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I'm guessing, but here's my guess:
If you let the camera automatically determine the shutter speed OR the aperture, it's going to try to set the overall brightness of the picture at some happy midpoint between pure white and pure black.
In order to get your nighttime shot, I bet you have to control both the shutter speed and aperture manually. I'm not smart enough to suggest the actual settings. But maybe you can try several pictures with different settings to find out what works best.
Good luck!
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Terrence Kent
{K:7023} 9/22/2002
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Great concept for the image, i know its almost impossible to frame accurately in the dark like this, you did well on that score, though this one might have been more effective as a vertical shot. As for making it appear more towards night time you could try a few things, having the neg printed darker and adding a blue cast to it could help, or bracketing 1over and 2under around your reading in full stop increments and then having them all printed at the same density (brightness) will allow you to choose which level of detail you want present in the final product, good luck and great work~
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Wietse de Graaf
{K:136} 9/22/2002
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This was at 2300 hrs. Pitch Black in the alps.
closing down all the way to f22 might help? And then let the camera decide what to do with the shutter?
Wietse
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Russ Cooper
{K:759} 9/22/2002
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Wouldn't some combination of a shorter exposure time and/or smaller aperture and/or less sensitive film get you closer to what you are after? What time of day was this really taken?
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