Prior to shooting for this month's TOPE, I'd done very little night
shooting. My low light shooting has been shooting sports or concerts
with flash, fast film, or pushed film. Natural looking exteriors
haven't been anything that came up very often.
But I have had some success with my limited attempts at
astrophotography (Leonids) by simply setting my OM-4T to Auto,
underexposing, and letting the camera figure exposure. I ended up
with a dark, natural looking sky, and good contrasty stars and
horizon lights.
So on my first attempt to shoot something for TOPE2, I noticed that
there was a lot of heat lightning one night, drove to a remote bridge
on the farm (with a great looking cypress tree framing the horizon),
framed my shot, set to underexpose 2 stops, and let 'er fly. During
the exposure, anywhere from 2 to 5 flashes of heat lightning would
occur (sometimes different colors), so I was sure I'd get good shots
(I was hoping a bolt would hit the cypress tree or a nearby
irrigation rig, but no such luck).
After shooting a half dozen exposures, I thought I should perhaps
flash the cypress tree to get it better defined, and freeze motion
(the wind was blowing pretty strong), so I started my exposure, gave
it 3 or 4 seconds, and then fired a hand held flash (Sunpack 433D) at
the cypress tree. Did this a couple of times, had lots of heat
lightning activity on the horizon, and was sure I'd gotten SOMETHING
useable.
Unfortunately, when the roll came back from the lab yesterday, there
were a dozen black frames in the middle of an otherwise normally
exposed roll. ARRRRRGH.
While it's possible that I shot the shots on another roll,
accidentally left the camera on manual mode (wouldn't account for the
5-10 second exposures), or otherwise managed to commit a serious
photo-pas, it doesn't seem conceivable that not even one of the shots
left so much as a trace on the film. Further, the exact same camera
shot some very nicely exposed night shots in Philly a week later
(soon to be submitted to TOPE2) on the same settings.
Anyone else ever do this? Did I make a serious mis-calculation? Any
ideas on what could have happened?
BBB
-
B.B. Bean - Have horn, will travel
bbbean@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Peach Orchard, MO
http://www.beancotton.com/bbbean.shtml
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