Bolo wrote: > I don't have a spotmeter, so perhaps the simple answer to this is > "wait until you have a spotmeter", but ... What did you meter and > what did you try to achieve with the metering?
Spot metering is all about setting your exposure to optimise the contrast range, and it requires a little knowledge of how the film responds to over/under exposure. I've written far too much below, and its not as hard as it sounds once you've had a little practise. I think I've made it sound harder than it really is. A note: when I talk about over or under exposure here I am not talking about the whole frame. I'm talking about one point on the frame, and how that point differs from 18% grey (or 13% or whatever Kodak calls a midtone these days). So a shadow area might be "3 stops underexposed" or "-3", and a highlight on the same frame might be "3 stops overexposed" or "+3". I hope I've made this relatively clear; I've had a few late nights recently... I used my usual technique for these shots. I started by metering on something green. I don't mean any green object, I mean a plant of some sort, like grass or trees. In this case, the trees on the hills at the side of the lake. This gives me some idea of a midtone. It doesn't have to be exact. If there's nothing green around you'll just have to find something that looks like a midtone (or meter the brightest & darkest areas and use the midpoint). Don't be afraid to meter on areas outside the viewfinder. This reading is just a starting point. If you do use a midtone outside the frame you won't need to consider it as much when you look at the rest of the scene later. You'll see from the first frame that I bias towards the highlights; I metered on the sunlit trees on the right. I don't mind black shadows but I dislike large bright areas because they distract my eye more readily than shadows do. Thats just my own preference. Some people like to get shadow detail at the expense of the highlights. But you still need to keep the midtone in mind (more on this later)! You need to make this decision because slide film only has a limited contrast range. You have to sacrifice either the highlights or the shadows. Occasionally you'll get lucky and find a nice low-contrast scene that the film can fully handle. I won't go into push- or pull- processing because I've never done it, and you have to apply it to a whole roll at a time unless you shoot large format. After getting a midtone reading I metered around the whole scene, using the viewfinder as a guide of where to meter. The clouds, the water, the misty distant hills. Bright bits, dark bits. I do this to check the contrast range, and I try to remember that I should bias my metering toward what covers most of the frame while keeping in mind what I want it all to look like. I can't really generalise this into a one-size-fits-all guide, but I have been caught out by concentrating too much on something thats only an insignificant part of the total scene, and ended up overexposing the rest. Its especially easy to make this mistake with wide-angle lenses. Sometimes I end up putting the camera away because I know the picture will turn out horrible due to excess contrast. However I will suggest taking a picture anyway as the decision depends on judgement which could be wrong, and if you're right it'll help you learn how the film responds to such an extreme situation. The hardest part of the process is figuring out how to adjust your exposure from the midtone reading, based on how you want the rest of the scene to look. For example, if there's a lot of bright stuff in the frame you might want to stop down a little to preserve detail. If my "midtone" area is in the frame I don't like to change my final exposure from it by more than 1/2-stop, or 1 stop in an extreme case. At two stops adjustment you're starting to lose detail in that part of the frame. In this kind of situation you need to compromise and decide where you want to preserve detail. In general I like to keep detail in my midtones but this is not a rule (and depends on the scene). I think in this case the rainbow was about 2 stops above the midtone to begin with, which I considered OK (note the rainbow is only a tiny part of the whole scene). The rest of the scene led me to decide to just shoot at my "midtone" exposure. The next frame looks like I stopped down about 1/2-stop (actually it might have been 1 stop) due to the higher brightness in the sky and the water. When I got to the 300mm shots the rainbow was a bit dimmer (+1 stop I think). I kept the "midtone" exposure because of the content of the rest of the frame. As you can see I was more concerned with my midtones than the rainbow itself: I just checked that the rainbow was within the film's capability to preserve the colour. If you don't need detail in a coloured area (eg clear sky) then you can get away with a bit more before the film starts losing it. You can see that in the 300mm shots, the colours are a bit clearer because slide film tends to start washing out colour when overexposed a couple of stops. Sunlit clouds can be difficult because they tend to be extremely bright. I usually just meter them for the purpose of knowing what they'll look like. I don't often use clouds to set my exposure; as with the rainbow I just check them to see how the film will handle them. If the clouds aren't too bright I will consider them. Sometimes you'll end up having to judge your exposure without a midtone. This is where a little experience helps. Mist and haze are hard to deal with but I strike them occasionally. I use +1 stop as a guide if I can still see something in the mist (eg the middle-distant hill in the duck shots). Its really hard to judge this, but I occasionally have to in the absence of an accurate midtone within the frame. The rule-of-thumb I use is that anything thats over or under exposed by two stops is not going to have much detail. For blank areas of colour like the sky, you can get away with another stop or two. > Off-hand guesses are going for shadow detail in the shore on the > right side of the photo, which comes out quite detailed. Or, > do you look for a middle gray somewhere for overall exposure? > Or ...? As I explained above, I like to prevent my highlights from going too crazy. I usually have to do this at the expense of shadow detail, and I often have to adjust my midtone slightly to make it work. I recommend bracketing anything important. With slide film a half- stop can make a significant difference, a whole stop out can ruin the picture. I don't bracket medium format very often, but I do when it really counts, especially if I'm not 100% sure of my exposure. There is always the option of using an ambient meter. This will give you a great midtone reading, at least for the light you're standing in (which might not be the same light as the scene you're lookng at), but for shadows and highlights you will be at the mercy of your film. This is why I use a spot meter despite all the guesswork. BTW for the Z-1p I just used centre-weighted metering, but I did not just meter & shoot the scene you see. I tend to use a similar (but much faster) method as the spot metering, then activate the memory lock and recompose. Getting away with this also requires a little experience ;) Now that you've read all this, keep in mind that the only rule is that your contrast range is limited by your film. What you do with it is entirely up to you. Cheers, - Dave http://www.digistar.com/~dmann/ (out of date) - This message is from the Pentax-Discuss Mail List. To unsubscribe, go to http://www.pdml.net and follow the directions. Don't forget to visit the Pentax Users' Gallery at http://pug.komkon.org .
