Take Five

It was a big long desk day and for once I stuck to my script and got through quite a lot. Darkness was looming before I got my first sniff of fresh air. Unlike last night Caley was immediately on high alert when he saw the boots going on. He makes so much fuss that he puts things clean out of your head. We were away ten minutes before I realised that both my phone and torch were still on the kitchen table.
When we got to the top of Maol Ruadh I messed about with bracketing tripod mounted shots again.
A technical Nikon issue coming up. Generally this camera has exceptional exposure latitude, dynamic range, call it what you want. Despite this you need to be careful with the brightest part of the sky or it “clips”, burns out totally white beyond any photoshop rescue, even in raw. Tonight –more so last night- I reckon there was a range of ten stops between brightest sky and dull foreground hence the bracketing. Despite the dynamic range you can only bracket at a maximum of one stop increments, thus if you want two images at 2 over and 2 under –which I know fine would have worked okay- you have to take 5 frames. My wee Sigma compact can only bracket three shots but they can be set as far apart as three over and under which is a far more practical arrangement.
The trouble with this 800 is you can pixel peep to the nth degree and when I combined two images I could see despite my best efforts there were tram lines on the horizon (where both layers were visible) indicating tripod movement. I had everything tight as possible (three second shutter delay to mitigate mirror induced vibration) and the bracket routine automated so that I didn’t physically touch the camera. Just –perhaps- taking two bracketed shots instead may have avoided this.

Memo finished!

Torchless, we trudged carefully off the hill in darkness. Caley had built up quite an appetite when he got in.