Photographing "Climbing The Sound of Music"

For this trip I decided to switch film to Kodak E100SW in a attempt to solve the overexposure problem that I was having with the old EKTACHROME in my Yashica T4 Super. Overall, I got the results that I was hopping for. The pictures in the Kitzsteinhorn story were taken using the old E400 and they are overexposed. The pictures in the Sommerstein story were taken with E100SW and the exposure appears to be fine. The warm saturation of the colors in the E100SW tends to give the pictures a golden hue that I find quite nice in mountain pictures. More important, the E100SW appears to not suffer from the super blue rendering of high altitude skies nor of the bluish hue on snow pictures that Fuji Velvia is notorious for. However, the warm saturation has its drawbacks. 

In interior shots, the E100SW renders flash light in yellow tones and this ruined some of my pictures (see this picture of Eduardo). I suspect that the problem would disappear using E100S, but nonetheless it is annoying to have to change films every time that you walk into a museum or a friend's party.

For the entire trip, we used the Yashica T4 Super. The camera definitely outperformed its $150 value (at B&H), enduring rain, snow, cold temperatures, dust, and the ill treatment of two climbers. We shot 19 rolls of film without any of the reported mid-roll-rewind problems. The 35mm/3.5 Zeiss Tessar lens seems to work best while operating at infinite-setting or for close-ups (2-4 ft.). The mid-range focus appears soft in some pictures and this is probably due to problems in the range finding mechanism of the camera.

One problem that I didn't anticipated was fog. During those early morning alpine starts, the camera had terrible problems focusing through fog, and this led to a number of bad shots in the Granatspitze-Sonnblick trip. Clouds also yielded the same problem as it was evident in some of the pictures taken at the summit of Großes Wiesbachhorn.

This time I won the war against the European X-ray machines with the help of  a SIGMA lead-laminated film bag (see Tuan's X-horror tale). I purchased the heavy duty model (i.e., for film up to ASA1000, $18 for the 20 roll bag at Penn Camera) and the film came out just fine. Furthermore, these bags are so commonly used nowadays, that the security personnel at Washington Dulles and Munich airports didn't even bother to open mine.

All PhotoCD services were provided by ADI. The conversion from PCD to JPG format was done using ImageMagick 3.8.7. In all cases the images were processed using the -sharpen 50 filter to remove the PhotoCD haze in the PCD files. Some images were adjusted (i.e., contrast, brightness, saturation, and hue) to look as close to the original slide as possible, when viewed in a SGI monitor.

Remarks

• UW = underwater camera suitable for diving
• * = not even weather resistant or splash proof
• AP = aperture priority mode to control depth of field
• +- = provides plus or minus f-stop exposure override
• MFW = manual focus and manual wind

Credits

• Ramesh Mantha provided some of the information on Rollei cameras. 

Pedro I. Espina^©1997