Banff

We had four days in Banff before I started back at work last week, half time for now. I took the gondola to the top of Sulphur mountain and photographed with the Pentax, aware that with such a well known location and limited chance to move I wasn't going to shoot anything original, but it was fun, and my first day shooting outdoors since the surgery - I even hiked (slowly) over to the weather station and back to find some other views.

I don't know what peak this is. I made the photograph with the Pentax mounted vertically, and three images swung horizontally. It was an interesting shooting situation. Except for right next to the gondola building where there is a concrete pad, all of the boardwalk is very bouncy and the tripod shakes with every footstep, even ones 40 feet way in some situations.

I also found that there was a great deal of atmospheric disturbance - the image literally swam on the lcd - so I cranked up the iso to 400 (remember it was very bright) to give me a shutter speed of 1/1600 af f10, the lens my 300 FA f 5.6.

This was a high enough shutter speed to deal with shutter shake (exc. when people were nearby) and also to 'stop' the air movement. The result is an image that is reasonably sharp, considering. Below is a 100% crop. The full size print is 62 inches wide at 300 dpi.