Hi, well, my suggestion was taken rather more seriously by some people than it really deserves. Several people have argued against it on mathematical grounds, but the arguments really have no merit. The scheme I proposed merely replaces one symbol with another. The f-stop values are in a sequence. My suggestion just uses the, or a, sequence number rather than the value itself.
The advantage is that the magnitude of the sequence number is related directly, rather than inversely, to the size of the aperture and I claim that this is a more natural way of thinking about it, just as a steering wheel is a more natural way than a tiller to steer a car. People who need to use f-stops for advanced calculations lose nothing. I would have thought that people advanced enough to do complicated macro exposure calculations using the f-stop system would have little trouble reading the results off against a scale to set the aperture, but many of the replies in this thread make me doubt it... One of my favourite stories about the way in which large-brained people often misunderestimate (to quote large-brained Dubya) lesser mortals is of Alan Turing, the computer pioneer. For the first computer he wrote the instructions in base 32 notation with the most significant digit at the right-hand end. As an advanced mathematician he thought it obvious that the symbols have no intrinsic connection with the things symbolised, so any coherent symbol system will do. He could not understand that ordinary people need a more natural way of dealing with symbols. The mathematicians in this group seem to have fallen between both stools on this one. One the one hand they fail, like Turing, to recognise the difficulties that many ordinary people have with the inverse relation between current f-stop notation and aperture size, yet, unlike Turing, they seem to treat the current symbols as intrinsic properties of the size of the hole. This is quite surprising, but that's enough from me! --- Bob Tuesday, November 26, 2002, 8:36:36 AM, you wrote: > I can't see the point in changing from an aperture value system that > means something, to an arbitrary system with no arithmetical connection > between settings and to the physical attributes of the lens. > To a beginner any progression of numbers will be as mysterious as any > other, so there is no advantage to be gained. But advanced > photographers would lose a valuable facility, i.e. the ability to > calculate exposure adjustments for any lens and for any format of camera > or enlarger, with any light meter at any magnification ratio (e.g. > close-up extension). And probably a lot of other technicalities that > escape me at the moment. > Long live the aperture ring on lenses, especially with the present > numbering.
