72MM INFRARED FILTER

This shot is potentially one of the last I'll be uploading for a while. It was taken on Saturday night and on Sunday while frolicking in a river at the top of a Scottish hill my camera had a disagreement with some water and fried and died :o(

I've been saving up some loose change in a sweet jar for some time now, so I'm going to spend tonight counting it out to see what I have and then I'll need to do some research on a new camera. Luckily I'm into Pentax and Pentax is into weather sealing... and I now see the advantages of this more than perhaps I had in the past! I would love the new Pentax K7 but my pennies aren't going to stretch that far, but I'm hoping I might manage to stretch to the K200D which is pretty much an upgraded version of my now dead K100D :o(

On the positive side, I've been trying to work out the best workflow using Lightroom and I reckon I have a good system in place now, so this is going to be a good chance to go back through my catalog and do some weeding. So there might be a chance for some uploads from shots that I revisit in the catalog.

It served me well.

72s exposure with ND400 filter

Update: I have a K200D now, with weather sealing ;o) Do you have any idea how difficult it is to find a K200D nowadays! I couldn't afford the K7 but this should do me just fine.

Further update: So about 2 hours after my camera died I was able to switch it on again but all I could do was press the shutter release. The screens didn't work, so I couldn't change any settings... about 4 hours later the screen started to flash up occasionally but it was still unusable. I left it overnight and by the morning the screen was stable but the date would reset everytime I switched it on and off. This made it pretty much unusable as the EXIF data was always going to be wrong. I left it for a few days hoping it might recover more but it didn't so I bought a K200D. I did begin to wonder if all the other settings were being kept but only the date lost, if there was some capacitor somewhere that had blown but just in case it hadn't I took out the batteries and let it sit hoping any residual charges would drain away. After a week I went back to it and this time it retained the date. I held my breath for a few days but all seems to be well. I seems to be working almost as good as ever again... the only thing I'm getting is a memory card error ever so often but when I switch on and off this is resolved. :o)

This is a story about time: 1 hr ----> 5 min ---> 1 min --> 30 sec -> 1/50 sec !

1 hr: it took me an hour to get there, Pinnacle Cove, Point Lobos, Carmel;
5 min: once arrived at this location before sunset, it took me less than 5 minutes climbing down from the vista point to that rock where I can get the best view of the scene;
1 min: watching the Sunbeam forming thru the rolling clouds (it only lasted for a minute or less), I set up all my gears in the quickest way possible ...
30 sec: this is the time I had to find the best comp, level, focus, ... but there was no time left to install my ND filters system because I noticed those birds were ready to takeoff and I didn't want to miss it! So I simply chose the rays of the sunlight to set up the aperture, which is 1/50sec. Not an awesome seascape photo overall, but I'm still glad to capture this 1/50 second in life.