The photo in the header of this blog (as of Dec 24) is the Spanish Peaks above the little town of LaVeta Colorado. As a small boy growing up in Colorado, a view of the Spanish Peaks greeted me every morning from our living room window.

Spanish Peaks and LaVeta Colorado

I came over a hill, saw this scene, and jumped out of the car with camera and tripod. I didn’t take time to put on gloves because the light was fading fast. It was a bitter cold, windy evening in early March and my fingers were getting numb. It was late in the day and the shutter speeds stretched out from 4 seconds to around 30 seconds or longer.

I used Fuji Velvia 50 slide film in a Canon F-1. I would guess the aperture was around f/8 or f/11 and the lens was probably a Canon FD 80-200mm f4L zoom lens.  The maximum shutter speed for the F-1 is 8 seconds so I ran out of shutter speeds as it got darker. I would meter the sky at f/4, then switch to f/8 and and two stops to the shutter speed the meter gave me at f/4.  For example, if the meter said f/4 and 4 seconds, I would shoot at the equivalent exposure of f/8 and 15 seconds.   Thanks to reciprocity failure, Velvia slows down at shutter speeds this long so I would lengthen the shutter speed by another stop, making the shutter speed 30 seconds instead of 15. A cable release with the camera set to B (bulb) made the long shutter speeds possible.

You can learn about equivalent exposures about 3/4 of the way through this article.