Thanks!

I suppose I was imagining the the scanner's sensor could capture RAW in the same way that a camera's one does.

But now that you point it out I suppose that even to get to that stage the film must have been developed to negative and so all of those "decisions" (the equivalent of in camera jpg processing) are already made by the person doing the developing.

I should look into getting high quality TIFFs though rather than jpeg. Thanks for the pointer. I didn't realise that would be an option.

I'll give that a go with the next roll. Thanks for the help.

Thanks for the feedback. I think I'm going to go for it

Everyone has nothing but good things to say about them.

I'd not heard people talk about the calibrating before though. What does that involve? Do you mean calibrating to ensure that when it says that something is in focus that it actually is?

I've been using a Pentax ME a fair amount recently and enjoying shooting film a lot. But I miss the post processing options I get when shooting digital RAW.

I always get film developed to digital since I don't need prints for everything. Does anyone know whether it is possible to get films developed into RAW rather than jpeg?

Thanks. They certainly sound great. I think I'll probably end up going for the optibright. It would be totally gutting to get it and then find it is too dark for work at smaller apertures.

I hadn't considered additional taxes. That is really annoying. I guess it will end up being around £150. Might need to save up for a while. Or scour the web for 2nd hand options.

Thanks for the suggestion. I do use focus peaking at the moment occasionally but I've just never really got on with it all that well. I don't really like using live view all that much - it always feels a bit unnatural to me. Not sure why because most of the cameras I have ever owned were compact digitals without a viewfinder at all!

Hello,

I'm thinking about getting a split focus screen for my K-30. I use a lot of manual lenses and I really get jealous when borrowing my dad's old Pentax ME. Focusing on the same lenses just seems to be so much easier.

Has anyone used a Katzeye with the K-30? The focusing screen is quite bright for a DSLR so maybe I don't need to pay extra for the optibright?

Any advice/experience would be great.

Is this still for sale?

Would the Katzeye screen fit a K-30?

Hi Adriana,

Sorry it's taken me so long to reply to this.

The blur in the 30 second photos is caused by the movement of the stars (star trails). See this photo for an extreme example:

https://www.pentaxuser.com/photo/user-15077/northern-lights-in-skaftafell-2-5653...

This was with a 30 minute+ exposure.

I also hunted out one of the ones that I used a 30 second exposure for:

[IMG]http://i42.tinypic.com/htyyk2.jpg[/IMG]

It looks ok at that size but see the 100% crop:

[IMG]http://i40.tinypic.com/4jpzc7.jpg[/IMG]

Particularly in the top left you can see that the stars have a very slight trail which makes them slightly blurry in the image.

This photo was taken facing West rather than North which increases the problem because the stars move faster the further they are from North.

All these photos were taken on my 18-55mm Kit lens. In the end that was the best option for me because it is the widest angle lens I own.

It absolutely is very hard to focus in the darkness. I think the real pro technique (suggested by PaulEvans) in these situations is to focus on a distant object during daylight and then tape your focus ring to stop it slipping. For these photos I mostly just stuck the focus ring round to infinity and then pulled it back a very little bit (the kit lens at 18mm will focus beyond infinity). That seemed to work well most of the time but I do have a few which are slightly out of focus which was a shame.

Nice shot! It doesn't look like it was taken at night. More like a strange sunset effect. Very nice. Was there a lot of moonlight?

I did take some photos with 30 second exposure. I could upload them tonight if you are interested.

But I found that at 30 seconds the stars often began to get blurry. I think it depends on the area of the sky you are shooting but stars move faster in some areas (the further they are from the north star). So I had to bring the exposure down to 20-25 seconds so that the stars stayed sharp in the images.

Also the aurora itself is moving and changing all the time. So the shortest possible exposure will give the aurora a better more defined shape. A longer exposure will cause the aurora to smudge.

Yes, I am afraid that the k-x was sold a while ago. But thanks for the interest.

The other thing I wanted to do on this thread was give feedback to all the people who helped me out before I went on the trip. Hopefully if I just jot down a few thoughts it might help people like PaulEvans who are off to shoot the lights later this winter.

For forecasts we used Aurora Buddy App and the Icelandic Meteorological Office. I think received wisdom seems to be that a kp value of 1-2 is about the least you need to see the lights in Iceland.

However the best lights we saw were on a night with kp 0 predicted only an hour or so before. We only once saw kp get above 1 on a clear night and that was probably the weakest display that we saw. So my overall advice would be to take the predictions with a large pinch of salt and that if you get a clear sky to get out to have a look in the dark. We generally saw the best displays between 23.00-00.00; but I have no idea if that was just chance or whether time is a recognised factor.

Having a clear sky is obviously pretty important, and again the Icelandic Meteorological Office was really useful for knowing what cloud cover would be like. However one of the things which hadn't occurred to me before I started taking photos was that broken cloud can make an auora photo much more interesting. There is one set that I have where a weird heart shaped cloud is floating through the display and provides an odd but interesting focus for the image.

With weak displays the camera certainly picks up the lights much better than the human eye. When we first saw the lights we weren't certain that were actually seeing it until we took the first photo. So even if it doesn't look like it will be worth a photo you might surprise yourself when you take one.

Focus - I never completely worked out the issue of focusing. When testing during the day, it does seem that my 18-55 Pentax DA focuses beyond infinity when at 18mm. However at 55mm the focus ring sits at infinity when pushed all the way round. In practice I generally put the focus ring all the way round and then pulled it back an unscientific 'bit'. I think this is one of the things I most regret because at 100% some of my photos do seem to be very slightly out of focus.

Rate of change - I think different displays must have different rates of change. I found there was always a bit of a tension between getting enough light and capturing the fine detail of the shape. I was lucky, I think, in that the dimmer displays seemed to move more slowly. This meant that 20ish second exposures still picked up the shape of the bands quite well.

ISO - I generally found that 3200 on my K-30 produced a good image with visible but controllable noise. Pushing to 6400 produced too much noise for me to be able to control in Lightroom - but I am by no means an expert there. Someone more familiar with noise reduction would be able to do more I am sure. Going down to 1600 or lower was fine but in the specific conditions I was shooting in I needed more than that to pick up the detail. A schoolboy error I made was forgetting to put the ISO setting back for day time shooting. I have a whole morning of sunlit photos shot at 64000ISO. They aren't nearly as nice as I think they should have been. Be warned!

Stars - For us the lights always appeared in the north rather than over head. I think this is due to kp values... Anyway I think this means that the stars are more forgiving to long exposures. Pointing North I was able to get 30 second exposures with minimal star blur/trails. I imagine that pointing overhead or south I would not have been able to use such long exposures without getting visible trails.

Noise reduction - I had both ISO and long exposure noise reduction set to Auto. In practice 30 second exposures didn't activate the long exposure noise reduction. I think because of the cold keeping noise on the sensor to a minimum.... Does that make sense? Thanks for the comments above from bb2 and Gwyn - I probably would turn off long exposure noise reduction if I were going to do really long ones again.

On a noise reduction side note, it was an interesting challenge in post to try to stop the weaker stars from getting removed from the image as noise.

It took me a while but I found the setting on the k-30 for turning down the screen brightness. Crucial for not ruining your night vision. I actually wish it could go dimmer. I wonder if there is any kind of dimming screen protector or something?!

Another great piece of kit I had was my very cheap head torch. It has a dim red light setting which was perfect for seeing the buttons on the back of the camera without buggering up night vision.

Also crucial is a pair of warm but thin gloves that you can operate camera buttons through. You can then slip the thin gloves inside thicker gloves while waiting for the exposure to finish or for the display to get stronger again.

Overall I think that the photos I am most pleased with were as a result of tinkering around on the night. The k-30's screen is good enough to get a decent idea of how good an image is. I spent a lot of time playing around with settings to get the best results.

The other thing is persistence. The best lights we saw were standing out at the back of our hotel at midnight after it looked like a weakish display had finished for the evening. Everyone one else we had been standing with went back in to bed and 10 mins later it came back strongly and we got the best show of the week. I think being incredibly over excited about the lights helped us stay awake and keep warm!

I'm far from an expert but I hope that something there will help anyone else who is planning to do a northern lights photo trip. I'll post more if I think of anything.