Another adventure as only someone as goofy as I can do it. I took my friend Ian Whitehead up Thunder Mountain to photograph the sunset on east Sedona. We went up in July, the hottest time of the year. And to top it all off, I decided to carry my 8x10 camera and gear (at least 30 pounds) up the mountain (which involves a little rock climbing). So we hiked up the mountain, and it took twice as long as usual (2 hours instead of 1). I drank 2 liters of water going up and had nothing left for the hike down. We walked over to the east side of the mountain and set up. Everything was looking great. Then 20 minutes before sunset some clouds moved in front of the sun and obscured the sunset. I felt so frustrated that I exposed a couple of sheets of VELVIA 50 film just so the hike up was not a total waste. And to really frustrate me, I forgot my timer and had no watch to time my exposures. And of course the exposures metered to over 1 second. I ended up overexposing 1 sheet, while the 2nd sheet came out okay. The photo above is from that first hike.
We decided to try again the following week. This time Ian brought his wife Lisa; she is a great person and hiker. We again took 2 hours to hike up the mountain. This time the sunset was perfect. I exposed 4 sheets of VELVIA 100 film, and 3 came out spectacular. The 4th sheet was just alright. We ended up hiking down in the dark. No problems, we just went a little slower. The photo below is from the second hike.
I took these photos with my Ebony SV810 8x10 camera and Schneider SUPER-SYMMAR XL 150mm f5.6 lens. In comparing the exposures I noticed that the VELVIA 100 looked sharper than the VELVIA 50. And the colors do not look that much different to me. So I prefer to shoot VELVIA 100.
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