What Is It Doing????

[smoke665]

Last night trying to get some moon shots, my K3 II started acting weird. For some reason all the Highlight warnings continued to flash regardless of my settings. F stop, Shutter, ISO, and highlight warnings all red. The meter registered changes to exposure but the other didn't. Went into the menu and turned off the warnings, which stopped it from blotting out the image, but the Shutter, F stop, and ISO, continued their red flashing. According to the manual this can occur in very low light. Very annoying. Has anyone else had this problem?????

 

[Derrel]

Possibly the exposure settings that were set were incompatible with night-time photography?

Keep in mind, that the full moon is lighted by the Sun...and as such, needs a very brief exposure....as in a "daylight" exposure. With lenses shorter than super-telephoto 600mm,800mm,1000mm,2000mm) or telescope, the moon will be only a very small percentage of the total scene, which might very well call for a timed exposure of say, ISO 400, at f/8, at 30 seconds to 2 minutes...meanwhile, the full moon itself would require more or less a Sunny 16 exposure.

What metering mode was the camera set to? That might matter, or it might not make any difference. Something makes me think that, overall, the camera thought things were wayyyyyyyy "too dark".

Try ISO 200 at f/8 at 1/640 second as a starting point, in manual metering mode.

 

[DarkShadow]

That is odd,maybe just the camera needs a reset a glitch maybe. I never had that happen when I shot with the K-3 but who knows with electronics.

 

[smoke665]

What metering mode was the camera set to? That might matter, or it might not make any difference. Something makes me think that, overall, the camera thought things were wayyyyyyyy "too dark".

Set to spot meter. Got the best result at F/9, 1/200. ISO 100 with EV -3.7. The whole time everything was still flashing red.

 

[Derrel]

Maybe that was the high negative EV of 3.7??? I dunno... Hope you got some decent shots though, no matter what the machine was warning you against!

 

[smoke665]

Maybe that was the high negative EV of 3.7??? I dunno... Hope you got some decent shots though, no matter what the machine was warning you against!

Trial and error I got a few. The smoke was still so thick that it was like a giant soft filter. I'm beginning to wonder if that might have been part of the problem

 

[pez]

Wow, I've never seen that problem on my K3, or any other Pentax body for that matter. Did you try removing the battery and installing a freshly charged one?

 

[smoke665]

Wow, I've never seen that problem on my K3, or any other Pentax body for that matter. Did you try removing the battery and installing a freshly charged one?

I didn't try removing the battery, but the indicator was showing fully charged. When I went back inside to light, it was working fine. As I said earlier the manual mentioned this in the fine print I'm also still wondering if the smoke refracting the light had anything to do with it?