I learned about what you are saying because I used a hand held meter with my H3. After transferring the readings to the camera hundreds of times I began to notice that the settings did not change that much over relatively long periods of time and would set the camera once then keep shooting until I noticed a change in the light. As you say, with experience you start to notice without even thinking of it. A cloud covers the sun, you open up a stop or two automatically. Sun comes out again and you close back down.
With an automatic camera you have to set exposure compensation. For some strange reason I keep forgetting to turn that back to normal. Freudian block against automatic cameras I guess.
How lucky you were to find a photographic mentor. It does speed up the learning process a lot. How nice of you to pass on that mentoring.
--
Shel Belinkoff wrote:
The next day I received my second lesson in photography. I showed Ray
the great negatives, expecting a compliment or a kind word, but all he
said was "Overexposed by a stop."
-- graywolf http://graywolfphoto.com
"You might as well accept people as they are, you are not going to be able to change them anyway."
