Professionals only thanks!?

Question

Metering: how do you do it?

are you auto

light meter - what type

a grey card or white or black

i do hand readings (Palm always 18%) - do you

so do you do it manually? do you ever bracket?

can you hand read exposure?

if you spot or center weight (auto in my books) what do you point the camera at?



i will edit things in so beware like if i get an answer i center average manaualy or something save us all and just say you use auto ceneter weight and bracket or what not


thanks in advance


a

Thanks Mr Ace

A question for the talented like you. So when you spot meter you point at what you want exposed right? but not if its black or white right?

Thanks for your answer my friend.

a

Doug

Many thanks, grey card i like (what you mean you lose control - the control is using the reading to control depth and speed?)

dont sound very scientific (waving camera around) but if your getting good exposure who can argue that?

great answer many thanks


a

Larry me old sport

Appreciate your answer alot! As you say grey card is solid (im the other way never bother with a card cause my palms always with me - and always solid for me)

I really like your bit about highlights and shadow etc


Nice work Larry, thanks for your answer well done.



a

Dr Sam

You are always welcolme here. Just dont want the usual answers like just put it on auto....auto the thief of good image making

Thanks a heap!

Wow 20 years loving trannies my respect for you just went cosmic!


Nice to hear from you!!

PBI are you ok in the head department, teaching ametuers to expose positives by sensing the light in one session? and how you they go without you calling out numbers a week/month/year later?

you may fool the ametuers, frankly sounds like trumpet blowing and phony!

Answer 1

Yo Sport,
An awful lot of Metering Madness here !!
To be brief -- it definitely depends on the subject matter and the effect that I'm shooting for here !!

I have several meters -- and when I actually use them (a great deal of the time I rely on my years of experience and the familiarity that I have WITH my equipment and past results) I will call on either the camera's meter, an older Wein 1000 flash meter OR and older Minolta multi-meter !!
When I use a card -- it is Always an 18% grey -- this has ALWAYS given me rock solid results !!
I've done the "hand metering" trick on occasions -- but only when I've been in a situation WITHOUT a grey card !!

I do bracket on a lot of subjects
Experience, over time, has taught me that there is certain subjects and situations that can be MUCH improved with a slight "tweak" that this action allows -- and it is MUCH better to have the results right there --- than to go "tweaking FOR them" in the dark or in a digital program !!!

In the action you asked about here with spot metering -- a great rule of thumb (at least for ME) has been to read the darkest shadow area -- then read the brightest highlight area -- and then set the math to where the center is between the two readings -- this will down play the brightest points to a more mellow gauge and bring up the hardest shadow areas to at least some slight detail while keeping the balance within the primary subject matter in detail !! Of course there are those situations that you WANT the shadow areas to go blacked out OR the highlight areas to go white out -- in THOSE situations spot read the most noticeable mid-toned of the subject of focus and let those upper and lower registers go blotto !!!

Hope this helps somewhat
And, if critiqing answers here, go easy on me, I'm old and I bruise easily !!

Answer 2

Given my choice, for 35mm cameras, I will take a match needle partial("fat spot") meter.

Using this, I will generally point it all over the scene and get an idea of the contrast range present.

I then apply some zone system thinking to my photography, and consider which element will be best served by being placed at middle gray.

I don't generally bracket, with the exception being in really tricky lighting situations. I use to always, however I found that 99% of the time, the exposure I arrived at using my above method looked the best anyway. With that in mind, I see little point in wasting film when I can get a great exposure without bracketing.

Or, for my personal photography, if I'm being lazy, I'll just meter off a gray card and use whatever numbers I get from that. I generally get good results this way, although it does take some element of control out. I don't do this very often.

Since I greatly despise carrying a separate meter, when working with a meterless camera like my Rolleiflex, I generally just eyeball the exposure using sunny 16 as a basis. I get great results even with transparency film using this method. I will occasionally bracket when going meterless, however the more I practice, the less I find this necessary.

Regardless of the camera I'm using, I almost never meter with negative film. I just eyeball the exposure, and let any lattitude in the negative cover up exposure errors. It speeds things up quite a bit, which is usually very advantageous in the sort of situation where I'm using negative film. If I do meter, it will just be a simple average or center-weighted average reading.

The one concession I have made to autoexposure has been the multispot meter on my Canon T90. When I bother to take the time to use it, it has the potential to give phenominal results. Basically, it allows you to take 9 separate spot meter readings. The relative brightness of each reading is shown on a plot on the right hand side of the viewfinder, and an average exposure is calculated. You can then tweak the average exposure in half stop intervals to get the exact exposure you want. It's essentially just an automated version of the system I described above.

Answer 3

My grandfather used to tell me "The purpose of a light meter is to VERIFY exposure, not to determine it."

He taught me to judge exposure, before I turned the light meter on. He also started me out on a 4x5 view camera for studio and landscape work, medium format for weddings and beauty pageants, none of which had built-in light meters. I never used a 35mm camera until I was out on my own.

I usually use the auto exposure matrix mode on my digital camera but dial in an exposure correction about half the time. I seldom spot meter unless I'm doing some Zone System work or a critical character portrait. I shot slide film for most work except weddings and other portraits before going mostly digital.

I bracket very rarely, only when faced with really unusual lighting.

I teach workshops on doing outdoor photography with NO light meter, teaching photographers how to judge exposure and get good photos with slide film with no light meter.

If a photographer can't get proper exposures of snow or beach scenes without bracketing exposure, they don't really understand exposure and aren't ready for my workshop.

I gave two talks to the Hilo (Hawaii) Camera Club two years ago, and one was on outdoor photography without the use of a light meter. Of about 30 people at the meeting, 3 had previously learned to judge exposure just as I teach. It's a fairly widespread skill among serious technical photographers and is still taught around the world.

Answer 4

If I was a professional, I'd answer this question. As it is, I will just ponder metering for a moment or two... Feel free to read my mind.

I grew up with a hand-held meter. Most of the time, I'd use it with a diffuser to take an average incident light reading. Just point towards the main light source and go. If the subject was tricky, I'd go over and hold the meter in front of the subject, but still point towards the light source. If the subject and scene were complex, take off the diffuser and go get a reflected light reading off the subject. I thought I had to learn the Zone System, so I thought in those terms, but I eventually learned that overexposure is the enemy and exposed for the main subject, even if the main subject was a wide scenic view. With B&W you can pull out almost anything in the darkroom. With slides, oh well... Unless you were going to print and crop, you just had to accept that some parts of the shot are going to be underexposed if your main subject is going to be right. This is where you "zoom with your feet" to eliminate troublesome light sources.

I shot thousands of frames of Plus-X and Tri-X without metering. I challenged myself to learn the light the way some people train their ears to perfect pitch. I'm pretty good with relative pitch which is not something that most people ever think about, so I figured I could do the same thing with light. Little did I know (the innocence of youth) that most pros did this anyhow. If it was not critical, I trusted myself to expose regular Ektachrome this way, but with EPR-64 (which became my favorite film), I referred to the meter more often. This stuff was factory rated per batch, so I figured that it Kodak would give me a heads up note for 1/3 stop variation, I'd better pay more attention to my exposures.

Today, I think that I think like David thinks. He thinks faster on his feet than I do, I am sure. On-board metering is pretty good these days. I probably use the Nikon center-weighted reading about 75-80% of the time. This would be for average scenes that include a main subject. Read from the area containing the main subject, press AE/AF lock, recompose and shoot. (I admit that I have not settled on a "permanent" position for AE/AF lock activation by the shutter release on my D200 yet and it's still at the default to only lock focus, so I use the AE/AF lock button if it matters.) If I am doing no more than snapshooting, I usually stick to center-weighted, but might go to the averaging pattern ("Matrix") on rare occasion.

My safety net, as you might know if you have read my mind in other postings, is the spot meter. I use this for the shots that I would have walked up to to get a reflected light reading 100 years ago. Take a spot reading off of the most important part of the subject. Bracket if you are scared and if you have time. Digital is particularly forgiving in the shadows and if I want to, it seems I can pull up almost anything in the shadows in post-processing. If it's too noisy, I just say, "My bad," and move on without it. I shot nothing but slide film for about 20 years, so I got pretty good at not wasting shots. I feel that this was great training for digital, because the worst thing for either medium is to blow out the highlights. For this reason, I keep my LCD set to show overexposed highlights. I am in the habit of taking a single shot and tapping the shutter button an extra time to shut down the LCD. If I am skeert about overexposure, I take a general shot of "anything" in the scene - even if it will go right into the trash can - and checking for blinking highlights anywhere that might tip me off to something in the scene that I had not paid adequate attention to. (He muses... "To which I had not paid adequate attention?" Nah, we are among friends.) Sometimes I have to hit the "view" button to check for blown highlights, because I actually have developed a habit of tapping the shutter immediately after the shot 99% of the time. Maybe I should just leave the monitor off and view as needed. I don't know. My battery lasts forever as it is.

Oddly enough, with digital, I almost never take a shot without some kind of metering assist. Okay, If I am doing casual shooting or repetetive shooting of the same scene or subject, one reading will do for the next few minutes, but metering is so easy that I just do it.

As far as bracketing, I rarely do this, even with free digital. When I do it, it is usually if the scene/subject is interesting and complex. Like slides, if you underexpose, you will increase saturation until you get a result that is too dark to use. Sometimes when you bracket, you will get an unexpected result - usually a happy accident in my case - where something is rendered in a way that you had not anticipated. Even when bracketing towards overexposure, you might discover something in a dark place (Oooo...) that you had overlooked.

Speaking of dark places, here you are still reading my mind. Don't drown in my stream of consciousness thoughts and I'll see you on the lighter side. Maybe Zone 7.