Traveling sans lightmeter: Need critique

[bagdadchild]

I am surprised to see the blown highlights and deep blacks/shadows in your photos. Is Kodak 200 Gold not very forgiving? I shoot many color neg films and films such as Fuji Pro160S are extremely forgiving. My impression is that color neg can easily be overexposed by 4 stops and give good results. Are your scans ok?

 

[dfoo]

...
the meter is just a tool only reads what it is pointed at - then you must guage
what that 18% gray is in real life .
..

Thats why, in general, reflective metering isn't that great. Incident or spot metering is far superior.

 

[pvdhaar]

As others have already pointed out, for a first time without metering, you're doing absolutely great, even though some improvement may be possible.

One thing that I've had to learn when going meterless, is that if the light is very low, the eye tends to overestimate the amount of light available.

This means sunny-16 works fine when there's plenty light (first picture). But when the sky is overcast and you're also in the shade from even that (like in the second picture), I tend to underexpose.. I'll allow an extra stop or two of exposure under those conditions.

Third picture is spot on by the way..

 

[Mister E]

I will give my analysis for one of the shots: Noon sun, shot at f/11, 1/500

For this exposure my thinking is as follows: noon sun at ISO 200 means f16 @ 1/200 (sunny 16). Going to the shade, I would open up 2 stops (f8 @ 1/200 or f11 @ 1/100), so 2 EV lighter than the exposure you guessed. Looking at your image I think this would expose the statue properly while blowing out the highlights on the right side of the pic which are already starting to blow anyway.

Yan

1/250, not 1/200

 

[MCTuomey]

Thats why, in general, reflective metering isn't that great. Incident or spot metering is far superior.

Not to be argumentative, but isn't spot metering just a specific instance of reflective metering?

Incident metering in neither superior nor inferior, imho. Whether it's one or the other depends how it's used, I'd say. An incident reading can cause a backlit subject in strong sunlight to be underexposed in the same way an average reflected reading can. Neither reading by itself will account for the backlighted subject properly. You have to use judgement in relation to the reading, obviously.

There's no substitute for exposure experience, really. Doesn't matter how you "meter" - by eye, in camera, ex camera, incident, reflected, whatever.

 

[mgilbuena]

Some great suggestions here! I may have be attempting to ween from the light meter a bit prematurely.

I brought the L-398A with me during my route to work today and had several surprises: The morning San Francisco Bay Area fog was EV12, not EV13 as I had guessed. The underground subway stations were a surprisingly bright EV7; I would have guessed EV5. Switching to shade has, so far, seemed to be a consistent opening 2 stops.

I personally began taking photography seriously with the introduction of digital and recently decided to learn to work with film (and I have found more and more people are joining this trend). Having a strictly manual, analog camera is a welcome relief and gets the camera out of the way of the art of photography.

I must have been mistaken in thinking color negative was less forgiving than B&W negative. Doesn't B&W, in general, have superior exposure latitude (11-14 stops) than color negative (5-7 stops)? I thought this would mean that even if I over or under expose, I would still have very usable results.

 

[SolaresLarrave]

Solares: You mean you take reflective light readings rather than incident lighting?

Yes, that's what I have suggested. Besides that, it's as Mike Tuomey said: take a reflected light reading and adjust to the subject. If your subject is white, open a bit (over expose), if dark, go under, as if you were metering off an 18% gray card. Then bracket your shot.

And Juan is also right: if you want to nail exposures, use slide film. If you stick to print film, you won't "learn" from your mistakes because the film's tolerance will hide them. If you use transparency... a half-stop off (over or under) may wreck your image.

I took a Leica MR meter or a Sekonic L-208 with for two weeks on my daily walk to work, and then on other times, and tried to guess and get different readings from different subjects. In the end, I developed my personal metering system and, once I felt fairly secure of myself, I loaded a roll of Ektachrome 400 on my M4-2. Most of my exposures were within tolerable margins of correctness... and that made me very happy.

Again, this was after weeks of playing with the meter... and also after learning that my eye tends to overexpose.

In any event, I keep shooting print film. My goal is not to nail the exposure perfectly; I just wanna have fun! 🙂

 

[mgilbuena]

Thank you all for your advice. Traveling with a light meter has definitely helped with defining or correcting the light as I perceived it. As luck would have it, I had my camera but not my meter, resulting in me having to guess 🙂

Despite that, thanks to my week exercise, my second roll of film has come back with much better exposure: