Mark, never fell asleep in the chair, but did one morning laying on the south pier at Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin waiting for the sunrise to shoot the North Pier lighthouse. Got there way too early, hiked out on the pier, and had in excess of an hour to kill before I even got to the predawn stage. I set up my camera and tripod and took a couple of photos of the stars to kill some time (one's attached so you know this isn't a bunch of bs!), laid down on the pier, put my head on my photo backpack to "watch the stars" - yeah, right, it's 4AM when this is going on! - and promptly fell asleep. Glad I woke up before the sunrise show started, as it was truly spectacular, yielding one of the photos I submitted to the HL photo contest, which I'll append to this post when they get done witht he contest judging!
In the "for whatever its worth category," the above collection of star trails in the constellation Orion was an 8 min exposure at the 80 mm end of my 80-200 mm f2.8 lens with the lens wide open at f2.8 using Fuji Provia 100F slide film. I had no idea that Orion was so big that I'd have to use 80 mm to get all of it in the viewfinder! The main stars of Orion are the 7 bright white streaks; the 4 corners of a square and thre 3 running diaonally are Orion's belt. The vertical blue-red-blue trio are the sword or scabbard on Orion's belt. So much for the celetial photo tour.
When the sunrise was well under way, the shot below was taken just to give you an idea of what I would have missed had I continued the Rip van Winkle gig. Fortunately, I was awake and got to photograph from the very beginning of predawn.
As for film processing, Mark, I don't do any of the wet work so to speak. I sure don't trust the local 1 hr photo place with anything!!! I'm fortunate to have a professional photographic lab here in Kalamazoo - Kalamazoo Color Laboratory 616-344-6000 (if anyone is interested and they will handle stuff by mail) - which is the only place I trust to do my processing. Because much of what I'm prone to shoot is under extreme lighting conditions, it's important to shoot slides rather than prints if you get into this seriously. With prints, either some techie, or some silicon chip in the processor is going to decide what your photos are supposed to look like, and when you've worked very hard to get something like the shot of mine that was entered in the Door County Maritime Museum's annual juried show last year, you don't want either the techie or the Si wafer to have a shot at deciding what color the lake and sky were supposed to be other than cobalt blue! The shot that I'm talking about is posted over on the Wish List Forum in my endorsement for having an HL Minature of the Sturgeon Bay North Pierhead light if you want to see it. So, there you have it as for what I do about getting my stuff processed.
Gary
