My subject matter is somewhat precarious though I am careful never to trespass. Let's say they are structures that people might now want photographed.
My subject matter is somewhat precarious though I am careful never to trespass. Let's say they are structures that people might now want photographed.
Find the distance between the standards corresponding to the hyperfocal distances for your lenses at your normal shooting aperture. Set your camera for the appropriate hyperfocal distance, and shoot away.
“You often feel tired, not because you've done too much, but because you've done too little of what sparks a light in you.”
― Alexander Den Heijer, Nothing You Don't Already Know
I can't say it better than that.Originally Posted by Peter J. De Smidt
If you want to measure a different, non-hyperfocal distance, you can prepare a "manual rangefinder" ahead of time. Take a pair of cheap laser pointers and attach them to a board, angling one in slightly. Measure the distance the beams converge at - where you get one dot instead of two. If you want to get fancy, glue one of the laser pointers to a protractor with a moveable arm, and you can make a table of angles and distances to work from.
When you are out in the field, project your two red dots, and when they merge, you can dial in that distance on your focusing standard. If you can hold down both buttons for just an instant, you only have to worry about drawing attention for as long as it takes for you to determine if the dots line up.
A more primitive way to do this is pick a constant length object in your scene, and compare it to a line in a viewfinder. For instance, street lamps in the same municipality are almost always the same height. In daylight cut out a rectangle from a piece of cardstock, hold it at arm's length, and mark the height of a street lamp at a known distance at the edge of the rectangle. Walk forward, and continue to mark taller (i.e. closer) lamp heights until you have enough distances.
Of course, you can buy an expensive laser rangefinder for golf (50-500 yards distances) and for hunting (don't know the distances). But where's the fun in that?
This is something I am interested in but I don't know where to begin however you have raised some excellent questions and away I go to research them.
I just found this hyperfocal length calculator on Schneider's website :
https://www.schneideroptics.com/soft...Calculator.xls
Focus during the daytime, mark everything including some chalk marks for your exact tripod position, and come back at night for the exposure.
This seems to be a good solution. As far as flare I'll have to finagle with my lens hood some possibly. However I was able to produce some very controlled streetlights in my last batch of processing which give me hope since they are at the extreme end of the scene.
I set the compendium shade or hood during the day also (since I find it very hard to do it at night). This also saves me a lot of set-up time when I'm shooting at night, which not only makes it safer, but somewhat lessens the chance of being bothered by cops, security guards etc.
It is obviously all quite cumbersome as a procedure but not so bad if you're shooting locally. After scouting the location I have to come back several times (including once at night just to do the metering). But this way each visit is shorter and might attract less attention, and I don't have to bring lots of gear for the actual exposure. By then I already have the lens choice, composition, metering and focusing done in advance. And to decide on a lens and composition I don't even use the view camera under these particular conditions. I use a 35mm camera instead.
Michael thanks for tour experience. I think all of you are on to something by setting up during the day. I might just set hyperfocal length and just worry about composition and any small movements necessary immediately preceding the shot
The only concern would be the difference in ambient temperature between when you set focus and when you takes a shot.
The change in temperature will cause a focus shift due to thermal expansion coefficient of the camera material and change in index of the glass. How much shift is acceptable depends on the depth of focus of the lens vs how much the focus shifts due to temperature. The amount of focus shift due to temperature depends on the details of the optical design itself...there's no real correlation with the speed of an optic except for the larger depth of focus for a slower lens. You can try John's suggestion and it'll probably work out fine, but if you runs into focus issues when you think you've set it just right then it might be explained by the temperature drop from day to night.
I used to run into this problem in astrophotography, where as the temperature dropped during the night I'd have to readjust focus from shot-to-shot (for a telescope running at f/6.3).
Regards,
Jason
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