I had a nightmare

True story. Just woke up at 3:30 am in a cold sweat. I was trying to take some very important pictures that would define my entire photography career. Working for a national advertising campaign, art director and others standing around watching me. I was in an ugly office courtyard at around 2:00 pm with bright overhead sunlight, no clouds. Crappy background everywhere. No flash. I was shooting with my very beloved Nikon FM2. For those of you not familiar, it is an awesome camera but very, very basic. No auto-exposure, no autofocus, manual film winding. I had one lens and one roll of high contrast E100SW film. I remember that distinctly. I had one hour to do the shoot and one roll of film. I was tryig to do exposure calculations in my head like crazy. I needed to come up with something unusual so was trying to use the sun in unique ways with backlighting, so shooting into the sun or sidelighting, but at 2 pm the sun is not in a very good position. Lots of contrast in the scene and since I was using high contrast slide film, I only had about 5 stops of exposure lattitude. I remember waking up doing all these exposure calculations in my head. I am so spoiled with digital. You do the same thing, but you can get kind of lazy and just get it close, then snap a pick and see how it looks, and adjust accordingly. With slide you have to get it right the first shot or at least bracket your shots, but I only had one roll of film so didn't want to waste too much film bracketing.

No wonder I woke up in cold sweats!!!

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James Pratt
www.advridermag.com
www.-james-pratt.com
www.motorcyclestock.com

James,
Those were "the good old days" ha! I remember always being is a hurry to get my K-64 shots back from the lab to see how well my
early morning wildlife shots came out. When they were right, they were beautiful -- some were just plain ugly! Interesting that K64 and others
are gone. Back then I could get slides back from Kodak overnight through Eppersons. I think I like being able to look at the histogram after
a quick shot and make adjustments instantly, but it does tend to make us a little bit lazy. Still have passion for it though.

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Kent Vinyard Photography