Handling overexposed skies with rangefinders?

[Sparrow]

There is absolutely no need to resort to filters or any of these complex solutions colour print film has bags of tolerance to overexposure. All that's happening with the OP's photos is a simple over-reliance on ttl metreing.

To blow a sky on Fuji superia one would have to go perhaps 4 stops overexposed. That would be more than f4 at 1/500 in full sunlight, that should really make the photographer consider weather he knows better than the camera what the settings should be

PS no offence Nick 🙂

 

[giellaleafapmu]

(1) Not (readily) in colour -- read the OP's question

Yep, sorry, my eyes skipped that part of the post.

(2) The Zone System is a somewhat wordy restatement of basic sensitometry. Hurter and Driffield laid out the basics in 1890. I admire AA's photography but not his writing.

Cheers,

R.

I agree with you, I also think that AA made a short and well-known story long. Still his system is indeed well-known and it was easier for me to mention the whole thing under this name rather than speaking of sensitometry and then explain what part of it and how I wanted to mention...

Just to add to the conversation and going back to the original question. I think the original post was asking things in a somewhat strange way. "How to handle overexposed skies with a rangefinder?". Answer: Exactly how one would do with any other type of camera, by exposing them properly, and this can be achieved by an appropriate use of the film/sensor latitute, by substracting light to the overexposed part of the picture (filters) or by adding light to the underexposed one (fill-in), just rangefinder cameras are not the best horse for this course as they do all these things in a slightly cumbersome way, filters' effect cannot be checked easily in the viewfinder, slow sincro and little on no electronic help means a lot of pain for fill-in and the fact they use basic film cassette and not interchangeable backs or film holders means one cannot expose each negative differently.

GLF

 

[Roger Hicks]

. . . I also think that AA made a short and well-known story long. . . .

Beautifully phrased!

We are in complete agreement, it seems.

Cheers,

R.

 

[Ezzie]

There are a number of posts here from people like Keith, Richard G, and Sparrow that suggest you consider the information provided by your light meter as no more than one of the inputs and use your brain to determine exposure. Many today seem to believe their meters will tell them the proper exposure. Only your brain can do that. Often the meter reading will get you close enough using negative film but it cannot be consistently relied upon with narrow latitude film.

Sometimes I wish there were like buttons on this forum 😉

 

[Ezzie]

Beautifully phrased!

We are in complete agreement, it seems.

Cheers,

R.

I concur. Only recently read books by AA and not of him. Must say the latter is much more interesting. He really can make a meal of things. Though some of his pictures are jaw dropping, even some of his Polaroid stuff (type 55 and 808).

He obviously knew a thing or two about metering, though I'm not sure I'm any the wiser after reading his advice.

 

[giellaleafapmu]

He obviously knew a thing or two about metering, though I'm not sure I'm any the wiser after reading his advice.

I think that more than anything he knew something about printing. But he was of course not bad as a photographer. His books are not bad either if you look at them in perspective. I am not from that time but if I understand things correctly when they were written there was not much material about the subject readily available. Now we are a click away from information about almost anything, we can send a message to world class photographer and, if they are kind, they reply to us with information about whatever we ask them if they don't have the information already in their blog. Even remotely located persons can buy educational DVDs about anything, from party pictures to very technical stuff like high-speed photography, but when Mr AA was traveling with his 8x10 on the top of his car nothing like that existed. I think that by explaining what he was doing (even if in a less than optimal way) he was a precursor of today's trend of sharing knowledge "for free" a-la-open-source...

GLF

 

[Nick]

Just wanted to chip in and say thanks for all the amazing and varied responses.

I've definitely, historically been a "slave to the TTL meter". I very rarely shoot in bright, open conditions so I wasn't experienced in having to factor in the entire scene. I'm familiar with the spot metering off the hand but on that occasion wasn't. I'm also not familiar with is using an external light meter and then comparing against what the in-camera meter is telling me.

To be honest I felt like there must be some blindingly obvious answer I was missing, and was a little hesitant to post. Glad to see it's stirred up some vigorous discussion around exposure techniques. Plenty more for me to learn. 🙂

 

[Photo_Smith]

Just back from a quick trip to Tokyo, and noticed that several of my shots in a park on a bright sunny day, using Ektar 100, the sky was overexposed.

On my DSLR, I can use my circular polariser as well as seeing the resulting shot. On my rangefinder, I tend to meter for the subject I'm focusing on, and in the lighting conditions I was experiencing, this resulted in the sky ending up nearly white.

To me this feels like an exposure and metering question. What's the best way to approach it with a manual rangefinder where options like graduated filters and polarisers aren't an option?

Without looking at your negatives I'll guess that when you metered for the subject you may have made an negative that exceeded the range capable in the print.
In other words the sky is in the negative, just not the print.
You can have a skilled handprinter 'burn it in' or try in future to meter for the emerging shadow and stop down two stops.
Lastly Ektar is higher contrast film, that means it may burn out sky and has more contrast than Portra which would be my choice for longer scale images.