> From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of > Paul Stenquist > On May 14, 2012, at 9:07 AM, Kenton Brede wrote: > > > I'm just getting started with film. One of the things I've read is, > > unlike digital, it's better to expose for shadow detail. > > Like most rules, this is, for the most part, bullshit. It all depends > on what part of the image is important.
different films and film types respond differently to the same light / meter reading so it's as well to understand that, and the rules of thumb about exposure are useful to know. 'Expose for shadows' is essentially aimed at b&w print film and generally requires some work in the processing and printing. So if you're not interested in that you either have to tell your friendly printer what to do (pull / push), or just hope for the best. Slide films where less forgiving of over-exposure because it was easier to blow out the highlights, and blown highlights generally look shit on slides. A lot of people routinely under-exposed slides by up to 1 stop. When I tried this I didn't like it, so I stopped doing it. The answer is to experiment until you understand what's going on. There is also an excellent book I can recommend called "Perfect Exposure" by Jim Zuckerman. His 'secrets' are not secrets at all, but it's a good book for understanding exposure. < http://www.amazon.com/Perfect-Exposure-Zuckermans-Secrets-Photographs/dp/158 2971269> > With film or digital, if > highlights are important, you want to make sure they fall within a > couple of stops of your incident meter of gray-card light reading -- > or zone 7. If shadows are critical, they should be around zone 3, > perhaps zone 2 if very dark. Again, within a couple of stops of the > median. With digital, it depends a lot on the capability of the camera. > With the K-5, I can expose for highlights and pull up shadow if > necessary. If i do that with the K-7, I end up with a noisy mess of an > image. > The big difference with digital is exposing for the histogram. By coincidence I did some test shots this weekend specifically to see how much difference it made to the shots and I was quite surprised. I took a series of photos of the same subject in bright sunlight so that the exposure ranged from deep shade, through a mid-toned paving slab, through to a bright highlight and some specular highlights on glossy leaves. I took an incident reading and shot manually, first using the MIE, then opening up until the histogram moved to the right as far as it could without producing blinkies. In Lightroom I used the curves to bring the exposure to the right so that each of the shots had approximately the same shaped curve and histogram with the values distributed from black up to white. The ones where I'd exposed to the right of the histogram were noise-free, whereas those that used the meter-indicated exposure were very noisy in the shadows and midtones when I pixel-peeped. This is consistent with the theory behind 'expose to the right' - Lightroom is having to invent values for everything to the right of the histogram when you drag it that way, and the difference is very noticeable. [...] -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
