shooting at night - A-DEP, MF, what?

Hi guys,

I've attached an image I shot tonight. I was actually hoping the bluff would be lit up with spots (you can see them at the base) but they were turned off so I had a play with available moonlight ... and was very pleasantly surprised with the results.

My problem, however, was focussing and picking an aperture wide enough to keep my ISO at 100 and my shutter speed below bulb, but small enough to guarantee that the foreground rocks would be in focus.

In the end I cranked up the film speed , picked an aperture around 6.3-7.1 and a shutter speed of 30 seconds. For focus I threw it into A-DEP with AF (somehow there was enough light for focus, not that I could see clearly! :eek then flicked back to MF and M (because it refused to shoot in A-DEP).

I'm sure there has to be a better way. Any ideas, ppls? (shot using 10-22mm lens btw)

Thanks!

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Better than using "M"? Not for me!

That looks pretty good. What don't you like about it?

You can avoid shake with Bulb if you cover the lens with a black card, open the shutter, wait a second, then remove the card. Same for closing the shutter.

Thanks PhotosGuy ... I'm happy with the shot, but the only way I got focus was by 'fluking' it with A-DEP ... I'd rather be able to work effectively with MF in this situation (?). And also I'd rather have been able to shoot at ISO 100 as the noise is pretty bad, esp. at 100% ...

Tried putting the lens on "M" too?

PhotosGuy wrote:
Tried putting the lens on "M" too?

Ha! Of course. The trouble was the scene was incredibly dark (it looks pretty light here, but the moonlight didn't illuminate the scene real well in my viewfiender) so I couldn't MF very effectively, and obviously using DOF preview wouldn't have helped either (WAY too dark).

I spose I should figure out the whole hyperfocal length business and use MF to set the right distance for my aperture size. But I don't have real fine-grained control using the MF distance scale ... arghh.

Thanks for the bulb tip by the way. I guess I can always pick an aperture that will be overkill for DOF, calculate my shutter time and leave ISO at 100. Just trying to find out if there are any more optimal techniques out there.

Thanks again.

I was thinking about when we had a "Time" setting that would hold the shutter open indefinetly.
What you could do for something like a 4 second exposure is set the cam to about an 8 second shutter speed. Hold a black card in front of the lens, trip the shutter, wait a second for the cam to settle down & remove the card for the rest of the exposure. Put it back if you want to end the exposure early.