Dee'liberate underexposure ?

[dee]

I wonder what it is , from the early days with reversal film , I always liked the richness of underexposure .

Maybe the blacks lose detail , but the highlights retain a transparency which works well on screen with digital .
I guess this harks back to the 50 / 60s and those pictures on the wall , maybe trying to retain richness with a guess focus / exposure point and shoot pre-1972 .
It's poor with monochrome , of course , but for colour , I usually choose to compensate by one stop from the camera reading - equally with the M8 .

Anyone understand this ?

 

[Jamie123]

I wonder what it is , from the early days with reversal film , I always liked the richness of underexposure .

Maybe the blacks lose detail , but the highlights retain a transparency which works well on screen with digital .
I guess this harks back to the 50 / 60s and those pictures on the wall , maybe trying to retain richness with a guess focus / exposure point and shoot pre-1972 .
It's poor with monochrome , of course , but for colour , I usually choose to compensate by one stop from the camera reading - equally with the M8 .

Anyone understand this ?

I'm having trouble making sense of your post. Was there a first part to it that got deleted?

 

[Roger Hicks]

I wonder what it is , from the early days with reversal film , I always liked the richness of underexposure .

Maybe the blacks lose detail , but the highlights retain a transparency which works well on screen with digital .
I guess this harks back to the 50 / 60s and those pictures on the wall , maybe trying to retain richness with a guess focus / exposure point and shoot pre-1972 .
It's poor with monochrome , of course , but for colour , I usually choose to compensate by one stop from the camera reading - equally with the M8 .

Anyone understand this ?

Not a full stop, but typically 1/3, 1/2 or even 2/3 stop. The current fashion for 'thin' trannies came in with cheap scanners that couldn't penetrate high maximum densities. And yes, I prefer M-digi pics with slightly less exposure too.

Cheers

R.

 

[Vics]

I used to err on the side of under exposure with transparencies, too. But that was just because you had to make a choice between the highlights and the shadows, there was so little latitude. With black and white I try to expose for the shadows and hope to hold the highlights as well (much the same with color negative film). I have always wondered about digital. I don't have a digital camera, but if I did, would one treat the color like transparency film or like negative film?

 

[Morca007]

I nearly always shoot slide film 1/3 stop under, and color neg film 1 over.

 

[ChrisN]

Sometimes the exposure comes out just right without any comp.

(Pentax K5 with Sigma 10-20, in-camera jpeg.)


Mt Stromlo, dome remains by Another Chris, on Flickr

 

[peterm1]

I under-expose slightly when shooting digital as well as film. Yes I know about "shooting to the right" and all that palaver. I think that particular "rule" is perfectly ok if you are in a studio and have total control over your exposure curve but in the field you takes what you gets - and often this means blown highlights if there is even a small amount of bright area in frame. So I always think that a little under-exposure (maybe one third to one half a stop) does far less damage than just a slight amount of over exposure. If not too radical this can be fixed in post processing often by simple fixes such as duplicating the layer and then applying a "screen" blending mode. As for a blown area of highlight, basically nothing fixes that apart possibly from cloning pixels from elsewhere in the image - something I have often had to do and hate. So in short I believe the same applies in the digital world and mostly if shooting my M8 I have it constantly set to one third under exposure when shooting out of doors in daylight conditions.