The Pentax K10D multi-exposure mode. Fantastic tricks. Give us more.

[Yvon Bourque]

 I read all kind of questions on various forums and blogs about using neutral density filters. The use of neutral density filters can diminish the light reaching the sensor, and in turn, allowing a larger aperture during bright daylight. I assume that you know why this is useful, but here is a brief scenario. It’s mid-afternoon with the sun directly above the scene. The scene is of a water fall or of water rushing in a river. You want to capture the water with a slow shutter speed so that it will have that soft velvety look to it. In order to do that, you need a slow shutter speed of 1/8th to 1/30th of a second, or even slower depending of course of the speed at which the water is flowing. At such a slow shutter speed, even with smallest aperture, it often is still too bright to capture the photograph. What do you do?

You use the Pentax K10D multi-exposure mode. I don't want to write a full page here on the subject, but please visit my blog and come back here after to leave your comments, suggestions and other tricks you have learned using this excellent tool. Let's help all other out. The more tricks you suggest, the more we all learn.

http://pentaxdslrs.blogspot.com/

Thank you for reading and for your response,

Yvon Bourque

[calsan]

Good one Yvon!  Always nice to have someone share a trick that can save money.  I'll certainly give this a go.


Of course, I find it ironic we pay so much for fast lenses and then would want to pay more again to make them slow...
 

One obvious use for the multi exposure is architectural shots, where you want to include people for scale but don't want to "detract" from the architecture too much.  Rather than doing a long exposure and having blurry people, set multi exposure to three, click, click, then put people in the photo and click again: you get see through see through ghost people that are sharp.
I suppose I'm sharing a trick everyone already knows.  Sorry!  Oo)

[sooming]

Yvon,

This is a great tip! I never knew how to use it, as such, this is a long forgotten feature when I use my K10D. Thanks for sharing, can't wait to try it out.

Added: In this case, can we also bracket the exposure for each shot, say 5 successsive shots for use with multiple exposure to create HDR on the K10D?

[Yvon Bourque]

Yvon,

This is a great tip! I never knew how to use it, as such, this is a long forgotten feature when I use my K10D. Thanks for sharing, can't wait to try it out.

Added: In this case, can we also bracket the exposure for each shot, say 5 successsive shots for use with multiple exposure to create HDR on the K10D?

As far as I know and as far as what I have tried, you cannot use bracketing with multi-exposure. It's probably because the K10D shows the result of each added shots on the LCD monitor. That would be problematic if you were to choose 9 multi-exposures with five different auto-bracket. That would be 45 different shots.

Maybe the K20D will have something allowing HRD photography, which I think is here to stay.

Regards,

Yvon Bourque

[sooming]

Ok fair enough, but we can still do it manually right? Of course the trick is to use a cable trigger so that no shake is induced.