Ken Durling wrote:
> learning how to use it better - using AE lock, for example.
Well, I think this is fairly essential, along with keeping a thumb on the
exposure-compensation dial. I find the current iteration of evaluative metering to
be excellent, but it isn't magic.
> But one of the main reasons I personally want to use a hand-held is as
> a "consciousness raiser" or educational tool. I want to be much more
> intimately connected to the visualizion/realization process, and I
> think a meter can only help that.
Perhaps, but it could also be an impediment, by being something else to fiddle
with while you're trying to find the best vantage point and framing, making a lens
choice, watching the light, etc.--in other words, a distraction. You get the same
information in the viewfinder of your camera. A better educational experience
might be working with a manual-focus, manual-exposure camera with a simple
match-needle meter (but no AE).
> I've also been reading Ansel Adams a lot, and
> I think that there's a lot of the work of photography that
> needs to go on without the camera up to your face. Learning to
> visualize the values you want and expose for them intentionally,
I think we should watch out for that word, "needs." Previsualization may have been
necessary for Adams, and for others such as Galen Rowell, but not everyone
processes information or experiences the world in the same way, and
previsualization might not work for others. It's a bit like taking
horseback-riding lessons and having your instructor say, "imagine you're a
tree--you're tall and straight and growing toward the sky." Well, that may work
for some people, but it sure didn't work for me. What I needed was for the
instructor to tell what to do, or what I was doing wrong, and to tell me
literally, not figuratively.
Photographers who rely on previsualization techniques--or at least those who also
write and whom I've read--seem to feel the need to insist that it is the only
effective way of working; they don't seem to consider that other people might find
it ineffective or even debilitating. So while interesting and perhaps even useful,
previsualization is not necessarily necessary. There's certainly a lot to be said
for spontaneity and being open to the moment.
Another thing to keep in mind when reading Adams is that his work is highly
formal, and while he didn't have formal art-school training, he did have
considerable classical music training, which is, perhaps, the next best thing. And
when we consider his influences--Paul Strand, Stieglitz, Edward Weston--we
shouldn't be surprised at the formal aspects of his work (I suspect his commercial
work helped as well). Finally, it is useful to remember that the zone system was
developed with view cameras and sheet film in mind--it takes as one of its
starting points the idea that you expose each negative with a particular result in
view, a result that depends on both the exposure *and the development* of the
negative. With sheet film, of course, you develop each negative individually, and
can therefore adjust development times and dilutions accordingly. This is rather
more difficult with roll film. In addition, the final result is produced in a
darkroom, using paper and chemistry of known characteristics; the system
encompasses the entire process from exposure to final print. This is extremely
difficult to achieve when the print is made by a minilab machine. And as a further
"finally," Adams's prints are, by in large, heavily manipulated in the darkroom,
in terms of dodging, burning, and control of contrast. In short, no amount of
hand-metering and zone-system exposing is going to cause "Moonrise, Hernandez, NM"
to come out of your camera (or mine).
> but there's a creative side to it that requires
> learning to override that aesthetic.
> I think a meter is necessary for that, along with
> a lot of practice and experience, or course.
It's certainly not for me to disagree with this, but . . . it seems to me that the
"creative side" has a lot more to do with *seeing* than with meter
readings--paying attention to what the light is doing and choosing your
positioning, lens, framing etc. accordingly. A meter just gives you numbers, and a
properly-calibrated camera meter should give you pretty much the same numbers as a
handheld meter. The creativity comes into play when you decide what those numbers
are telling you, and it seems to me that it doesn't matter whether those numbers
come from your camera's meter or from one in your hand. Of course, it's a
different story when the light is such that your in-camera meter can't cope with
it effectively, but that doesn't seem to be what you're getting at here. So, the
practice and experience part seems to me far more important than the device you
use to get your starting point (the meter reading). For *me*--and this may not be
the case for others--learning to intuit exposure compensation has been far more
useful than learning to fiddle with a hand-held meter. I can't explain how to
learn this--I suppose I've been doing exposure compensation for so long that I
hardly think about it except in especially difficult circumstances (snow in bright
sun, for example, with a dark middle- or background), since, thinking back now, I
realize that I was doing "exposure compensation" for years with my FTb, whenever I
moved the match needle off the "correct" exposure to meet the particular
requirements of a scene. And this just reinforces the notion that a light
meter--any light meter--is just an aid: it gives you a starting point, but you
need to know what to do with that information for it to be useful. Perhaps I'm
being dense, but I don't see how using a hand-held meter just for the sake of it
will teach this.
It may seem like I'm saying don't buy a hand-held meter, but I'm not, really. I
think what I'm doing is sounding a cautionary note that you may be expecting too
much from a hand-held meter; to not get too caught up in the tools to the
detriment of the process; that the only way you'll learn to use the numbers most
effectively is--IMO--to shoot a lot of film and make a lot of mistakes, and then
figure out why your results weren't what you had expected. It is a truism that a
good photographer--i.e., one who is in control of her materials rather than the
other way round--never has to say, "I hope they come out," so in that sense we all
previsualize to some extent, when we frame our shot and press the shutter (since
we know we got what we were after); but that doesn't mean getting caught up in one
dogma or another. Control comes from experience and experimentation, not from
following someone else's rules.
I think I've used up my allotment of "pompous" for this evening--happy shooting!
Craig
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