by benjaminjk | May 13, 2014 | photography |
I was out at Dry Run Creek yesterday. Since we had nice overcast skies, I thought I would shoot a few moving water images. I planned to shoot 4×5 large format film. My 4×5 camera is very large, and excessively heavy. After setting up the first shot, I moved the tripod a little, and the screw that attaches the camera to the tripod broke, and the whole camera fell into the water. Completely Submerged. I was a little upset to say the least. When I pulled the camera out, at least a gallon of stream water flowed from the bellows. I was surprised that no trout jumped out of it. Once I finished fishing the camera from the creek, I finished my walk and came home. I took the camera apart as soon as I got inside. Luckily, there are no electronics in this camera, it is fully mechanical. Everything looked OK, the only thing that i was worried about was the lens and shutter. Once the lens was apart, all the glass dried nicely. The shutter, however was a little more difficult. After spending time in a bag with a hair dryer blowing on it for about 30 minutes it dried out nicely as well. I suppose I am lucky that it was the 4×5 that fell in the creek and not the digital SLR that fell in. There is no way the digital would have escaped a fall like that unscathed 😉 Interestingly, this marks the 4th camera that has been completely submerged in a body of water, it is one of the hazards when photographing moving water or...
by benjaminjk | May 4, 2014 | photography |
I have been trying to get a shot of one of the eagles flying to the nest with a fresh kill for some time. I have seen them fly in several times, and I either don’t have a clear view of them, or the images that I do get are soft, or some other technical problem. This is such a tough shot to get, they fly in without warning, from a completely unpredictable direction, and they are moving very fast. eagles.mp4 from Ben King on...
by benjaminjk | May 1, 2014 | photography |
Last summer we were out exploring the area, and stumbled across the ruins of an old house near Red Bank Access in Gamelia, Arkansas. I have been planning on going back to it to shoot the Milky Way rising behind it. Since there is almost no light there (and to the south of this location there is very little light pollution) this should be an absolutely stunning location for shooting the Milky Way. The old building and lake in the foreground will provide a nice anchor for the image and will add considerable interest to the milky way shot – at least that is what I hope. A friend approached me, and wanted get a few people together to go shoot, I suggested that we go to Red Bank. We had a favorable forecast, it was partly cloudy during the day, but the forecast was for clearing skies by 10 pm. We planned to shoot at 3 am, when the brightest part of the milky way would be at it highest point in the sky. During the day of, the forecast changed a little, calling for the clear skies to become partly cloudy at 3 am; so we moved up our shoot by an hour. As the night went it, it stayed pretty cloudy, and right around 1 am it cleared up. I arrived to the location right at 1 am. It looked awesome, I could see the Milky Way, and so I knew that it would photograph well. It had been almost a year since being at this location, and there was a TON of deadfall along the...
