Crazy Idea For Daylight Street Shooting With Fixed or Single Lens Cameras

When I walk in my city, where there are also areas like this, hard light and dark shade, about 3 stops difference. I constantly observe what's going on and dial in my M3 constantly, usually 1 stop aperture and 1 or 2 stops down with shutter speed, if indeed that's what I want. Sometimes I want silhouettes and then I just leave my settings for the sun 🙂
 
I find it frustrating changing settings all the time, but that's most likely because the shutter speed and aperture rings are tiny and right next to each other on the himatic. otherwise i probably wouldn't have an issue.. I figure I am more in control of the exposure by setting it via incident meter and some guesstimation in my head.
 
Just weighing in on the side of carrying fewer cameras. I don't always follow my own advice, but I do find that I often shoot more when I have only one camera -- rather than deciding which to use, it makes me decide how to shoot.
 
Of all the places I've been to, the Old City has probably one of the most extreme cases of mixed lighting. Since you're in West Jerusalem, you have an easy opportunity to test out some theories.

As others have said, having multiple cameras just confuses the issue. One camera, one lens should do the trick. Matt's addition of one aperture is a bit too extreme for me personally, although I would agree that f5.6 is probably where most of your shots will be.

My own suggestion would be to address the mixed lighting issue with a combination of exposure and darkroom work: 1) expose for shadows, and develop for highlights (be careful of blown highlights) or 2) downrate your film and decrease dev time.

I've used both techniques to some degree of success in and around Jerusalem and the Galilee area.

Good luck!
 
Ruben,

After lots of struggeling against the crazy contrasts we have here, I have reached some understandings:

1 - Very seldom will a shot mixing both strong light and shaddows yield a good picture (Unless special effect is required and you want all black shadows or all burnt highlights)

2- you can try to cope with the problem with special developers, but the problem is that for my taste, strong light is often ugly, and for shooting people, or street, I prefer overcast.

For my outside work, I ended following that advice of a local photog:
"shoot in the winter, print in the summer"
 
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