Hello - seeking to learn, am I in the right place?

- The sun itself doesn't vary in brightness by any meaningful amount, but the absorption of light by the atmosphere varies considerably, as does the scattering of light by clouds, dust, pollution, mist etc. As a result, what appears to be 'full, open sunlight' can easily vary by a stop or more. Add in variation with time of year, and a table can be out by a couple of stops.

 

Over a year, I've logged noonday sunlight (with hard shadows) at anywhere between 60 KLux and over 140 KLux, and that's at only a moderate latitude and within minutes of maximum sun altitude.

 

You'd need a separate table for every few degrees of latitude and hours of the day, and with an almost infinite list of conditions and variables for it to be anywhere near as accurate as a meter. You might as well tell the OP to just stick a wet finger in the air and guess!

 

WRT getting a shadowless background while having some modelling in the lighting: What's needed for this is a 'product table', which has a translucent surface that can be backlit to eliminate shadows.

 

Good pictures are less about the camera, and more about what happens in front of it - and who's behind it.

I didn't really tell the OP not using the meter although I often don't. I tried to explain to the OP that people who estimate exposure don't do it by eyes they do that by estimating the lighting condition.

I tried to explain to the OP that people who estimate exposure don't do it by eyes they do that by estimating the lighting condition.

- And how do they do that if not by using their eyes?

It appears that Rayvan's application is going to be product or artefact photography, which will almost certainly be done with some sort of artificial light. Therefore an exposure table is going to be absolutely useless to the OP in artificial light or when using flash.

I really don't get this Luddite rejection of technology. What's a camera if not a piece of technology? And film is also an application of science and technology. So why draw an arbitrary line in the sand of progress that stops at cogs and chemicals? Why not a lightmeter? Why not a built-in lightmeter?

I can understand wanting to learn from first principles, but learning the first principles that only applied in the early decades of last century is a bit short-sighted IMO.

One of my strongest memories from high school involved bread. In history class, I read that modern yeast we buy in jars was invented a little over a hundred years before, and not common where I lived in the world until the 1940s. I also learned that day that people baked leavened bread for thousands of years. From this, I drew the conclusion that there must be some other source of yeast they used prior to the invention of modern yeast. So I asked my home economics teacher about this and she said that it was possible, but I would kill everyone so don't try it.

This reply surprised me and instead of going home after classes ended, I went to visit my grandmother's house. After all, she learned to bake bread long before modern yeast was common or affordable. She talked about it in the past. Maybe she could give me some words to take to the librarian (pre-internet days) so I could learn how people used to make bread. It wasn't something I wanted to do every day, mind you, but I just wanted to know how they did it. After the greetings and the 'you never visit often enough' and 'let's phone your parent's, they must be worried sick with you running away like that', I worked up the courage to ask her about bread. Her reply was short and simple. "It's too difficult. Don't bother." When I pressed her, she added "you won't get predictable results. You had best stick with the proper method of making bread."

And so ended my first attempt to learn the history of bread making.

And yet now, there are many books about baking sourdough bread at home. My city is overflowing with bakeries that specialise in this art - almost to the point where we have more bakeries than speciality coffee shops! Keeping a sourdough starter is considered an essential skill in my circle - even by people who seldom bake their own bread. It's amazing what a few years and a different perspective makes.

Back to light, light meters, and photography.

I worry I haven't expressed myself well.

When I see "The eye is not a good light meter", I trust that this is correct. I'm confident that you all have far more experience with this than I do and I'm grateful that you are willing to help nurture an amateur's enthusiasm for photography.

When I see "The eye is not a good light meter", I understand the sentence. I understand the individual words. I understand how this applies to my areas of expertise (which involves a lot of colour work). But none of this helps me understand what it feels like to use my eye as a light meter. I can read about it forever and 36 days, but it won't give me the experience.

I know not using a light meter may seem stressful to you. That's okay. It's stressful for me too. After all, I'm spending money on a roll of film and having it developed. Having a strong chance of wasting money like that bites at my miserly soul. However, it's not something I'm going to be doing a lot of. It's a step in the learning process. The next step involves using a camera with a light meter. Then maybe take both out and see how they compare taking pictures of the same thing.

Do you see? I want to understand what the results of "The eye is not a good light meter" feel and look like and what it's like using my eye as a light meter. I might like it, or I may decide that it is folly to live life without a light meter and carry one on a string around my neck until the day I die.

It's like sourdough bread - one doesn't have to make it every day, but using this ancient technique once or twice, greatly improves one's understanding of how bread works.

On that note, I would love to see the photos you've taken without a light meter so I can learn what it looks like when someone with loads more experience than I have takes photos without the aid of this technology.

Light meters really came into common use with color and particularly color slide films, which have a narrower exposure range. Before that, box cameras and their more sophisticated brethren had none. My first camera, in the '50's, a Brownie, had none and took pretty good photos. If you stick to Monochrome film, particularly those with a wide ISO range, and follow one of the charts or exposure guides, you can certainly get good photos under most conditions. Depending on the film ISO, you can choose an F stop and appropriate shutter speed with your C 3, then simply concentrate on composition and focus. I think your instinct is good, and your intent interesting - you might actually be better served by buying one of the ridiculously inexpensive box cameras that takes readily available 120 film. The larger negative size is advantageous. Simply search box cameras for 120 film on your favorite online shopping site. Good luck with your project - the idea almost tempts me, but I already have a lifetime supply of film cameras!

BTW I kept sourdough starter for years, but now have a No Knead / Dutch Oven recipe that produces a loaf I prefer!

- And how do they do that if not by using their eyes?

 

It appears that Rayvan's application is going to be product or artefact photography, which will almost certainly be done with some sort of artificial light. Therefore an exposure table is going to be absolutely useless to the OP in artificial light or when using flash.

 

I really don't get this Luddite rejection of technology. What's a camera if not a piece of technology? And film is also an application of science and technology. So why draw an arbitrary line in the sand of progress that stops at cogs and chemicals? Why not a lightmeter? Why not a built-in lightmeter?

 

I can understand wanting to learn from first principles, but learning the first principles that only applied in the early decades of last century is a bit short-sighted IMO.

For example the sunny 16 condition. They don't look at the scene and say it's bright enough for that. They look at the way the sun is shinning on the subject. Just like if you use a 100W bulb 5ft away from the subject. They determine based on that not on how bright they see.

I never tell the OP not using a meter. For me these days unless I shoot in auto I don't use the meter.

For example the sunny 16 condition. They don't look at the scene and say it's bright enough for that. They look at the way the sun is shinning on the subject. Just like if you use a 100W bulb 5ft away from the subject.

- No, no, no and no again! The light from a 100w bulb 5ft away only passes through 5ft of air, which affects it hardly at all. Sunlight has to travel through miles of atmosphere, which varies with time of day, time of year, latitude and altitude of the location, and degree of atmospheric suspension.

"Ug, sunshine. Durr, me give 1/125th at f/16" - Go on then neanderthal; meanwhile homo sapiens is going to use the tools (s)he's invented and get the exposure right.

Lessee - if I recall, the fanciest box camera I ever got my hands on had a few choices - F11 or F16, 100th or 125th, or you could attach a flash that took #5 bulbs. Dam, the thing mostly did what it was supposed to! Certainly, a proven technology, long before digital, BTW Stone age folks weren't backward - they used obsidian to make cutting tools. Obsidian scalpels are still the sharpest / smoothest today.

Mostly, I think the OP has a learning path he wants to follow - his choice - just has to make sense to him. An interesting idea, IMO.

Do you have a favourite book about photography?

• Ansel Adams' trilogy Camera Negative Positive
  
• Light Science & Magic <-Bold because even bibliophobic* me recommends getting hold of a used copy. (*= Books belong into your brain; not your shelf. - Posessing printed paper is unhealthy, when you'll move houses.)
  
• Same vintage as your Argus: Alexander Spoerl "Mit der Kamera auf Du" - Might be "Living with a camera" in English. - Sorry I have no clue how much it suffered during translation. Its a somewhat humorous "how to".
  

Like many (highly respected!) folks above, I am not convinced if your chosen path is the smart one.

Attempting to walk in your shoes I dare to say: The Argus is too modern and that way too complicated for a meterless approach. - Let me suggest alternatives:

1. Shoot sheet film in an old plate camera; make one mistake at a time, go home process it, bite your ass or pat your shoulder. This will be as instant a feedback, as film permits and it will save you from the accounting hassle of taking notes about 36 badly guessed exposures.
   
2. Working with tables might they be printed or due to experience in the back of your head is possible, but unfortunately you aren't necessarrily tuned to the same point zero as a printed table's author. For that reason I suggest dry swimming; in your case a semi-metered approach. - I assume you own a crappy Android device? - Download a free exposure meter app for it. Meet up with some exposure meter owner & user and let them check if the app is right tell you how to set your ISO differently (if needed) and when you got it calibrated, walk your life and meter around for about two days, to become more light aware maybe Get your printed table out too and scratch your head once in a while. Take the Argus out on the 3rd day (& try to take notes about each exposure too).
   

Personally I am no huge fan of Sunny 16 & such. When I started out with something like your Argus in 1984, I was happier when dad bought me a meter.

I#d dare to do sunny 16 in a pinch on a roll of color negative film these days, but I still wouldn't feel comfy. IMHO the skill about metering or not gets condensed in what might still be remembered as "the Al Kaplan walk around approach" in some parts of photo.net: Landing somewhere, getting your meter out to get an idea of the light around you, metering the different areas of a venue, mind-mapping them into your memory getting the camera out and setting it right (without metering between shots and stuff). Advantages: Less worries about major guesswork errors. Knowing what you can shoot where in advance (This looks way cooler than getting a Spotmatic up to your eye aiming it operating a ring and the metering switch, twisting the exposure dial, lowering it checking what reading you got, uttering "Darn! Sorry, too dark" to your subject and re-packing the camera.)

Anyhow: Have fun on your journey.

I am sure you'll find benevolent & helpful folks in here whenever you manage to post a question.

Oh, if you'll manage to read through Ansel Adams: he describes the (admittedly over my head) zone system for predicting / previsualizing a shot with the help of a few spot meter readings. - This is as anal and time consuming as metering can get. - Why? - Adams himself was a heck of a darkroom wizard capable of printing even really nasty negs. He was teaching students though and understood: Printing would be much easier for them, if their negs were well and similiarly exposed.

A good darkroom printer can salvage a moderately bad neg but: This takes more skills than exposing consistently.

For a cheap manual mode experience I suggest getting hold of an elderly lower tier Nikon DSLR and an old manual focus lens. - The camera won't meter with it but still: Judging your histogram & getting the next shot right is what manual mode is all about these days.

One of my strongest memories from high school involved bread. In history class, I read that modern yeast we buy in jars was invented a little over a hundred years before, and not common where I lived in the world until the 1940s. I also learned that day that people baked leavened bread for thousands of years. From this, I drew the conclusion that there must be some other source of yeast they used prior to the invention of modern yeast. So I asked my home economics teacher about this and she said that it was possible, but I would kill everyone so don't try it.

 

This reply surprised me and instead of going home after classes ended, I went to visit my grandmother's house. After all, she learned to bake bread long before modern yeast was common or affordable. She talked about it in the past. Maybe she could give me some words to take to the librarian (pre-internet days) so I could learn how people used to make bread. It wasn't something I wanted to do every day, mind you, but I just wanted to know how they did it. After the greetings and the 'you never visit often enough' and 'let's phone your parent's, they must be worried sick with you running away like that', I worked up the courage to ask her about bread. Her reply was short and simple. "It's too difficult. Don't bother." When I pressed her, she added "you won't get predictable results. You had best stick with the proper method of making bread."

 

And so ended my first attempt to learn the history of bread making.

 

And yet now, there are many books about baking sourdough bread at home. My city is overflowing with bakeries that specialise in this art - almost to the point where we have more bakeries than speciality coffee shops! Keeping a sourdough starter is considered an essential skill in my circle - even by people who seldom bake their own bread. It's amazing what a few years and a different perspective makes.

 

Back to light, light meters, and photography.

 

I worry I haven't expressed myself well.

 

When I see "The eye is not a good light meter", I trust that this is correct. I'm confident that you all have far more experience with this than I do and I'm grateful that you are willing to help nurture an amateur's enthusiasm for photography.

 

When I see "The eye is not a good light meter", I understand the sentence. I understand the individual words. I understand how this applies to my areas of expertise (which involves a lot of colour work). But none of this helps me understand what it feels like to use my eye as a light meter. I can read about it forever and 36 days, but it won't give me the experience.

 

I know not using a light meter may seem stressful to you. That's okay. It's stressful for me too. After all, I'm spending money on a roll of film and having it developed. Having a strong chance of wasting money like that bites at my miserly soul. However, it's not something I'm going to be doing a lot of. It's a step in the learning process. The next step involves using a camera with a light meter. Then maybe take both out and see how they compare taking pictures of the same thing.

 

Do you see? I want to understand what the results of "The eye is not a good light meter" feel and look like and what it's like using my eye as a light meter. I might like it, or I may decide that it is folly to live life without a light meter and carry one on a string around my neck until the day I die.

 

It's like sourdough bread - one doesn't have to make it every day, but using this ancient technique once or twice, greatly improves one's understanding of how bread works.

 

On that note, I would love to see the photos you've taken without a light meter so I can learn what it looks like when someone with loads more experience than I have takes photos without the aid of this technology.

You should learn about photography in any way that you want, but many people on this site have a lot of experience and are trying to help you get to the point of reliably making technically good photographs without having to use 10 times as much film as an experienced photographer to get the same results. That said, I admire your attempt to thoroughly understand things from the ground up. If you stick with it you will have a kind of knowledge that most photographers don't have, especially now in an era when digital cameras that are really computers with an imaging chip and a lens mount . But you will find that for the most part the eye is a lousy light meter precisely because it adapts so well and so quickly to changing conditions, something that I stress with my beginning photo students.

One other advantage of a lightmeter, or smartphone lightmeter app is that its calculator dial, or display, will show you the combinations of shutter speed and aperture that result in the same exposure.

E.g: 1/15th + f/22, 1/30th + f/16, 1/60th + f/11, 1/125th + f/8, etc.

All of the above combinations will give the same exposure, but the resulting picture may look very different. They'll all have a different amount of depth-of-field, due to the change in aperture, and anything moving is going to be blurred to a different degree due to the time the shutter remains open.

An exposure table doesn't explain this. You have to experiment and see the effect yourself, or look at example pictures.

BTW, yeast is a type of fungus that's been around for tens of thousands, if not millions of years. Its spores float in the air and congregate on fruit, grasses, even us! It's been used to make bread and beer since at least the time of ancient Mesopotamia. That we didn't know anything about it, or give it a name, or culture it commercially didn't stop it existing and making bread and brewing wine and beer for us.

So-called sourdough bread uses yeast too. Its just 'wild' yeast that's found floating in the air. It still consumes sugars and farts carbon-dioxide, just like bought yeast, only more unreliably.

One other advantage of a lightmeter, or smartphone lightmeter app is that its calculator dial, or display, will show you the combinations of shutter speed and aperture that result in the same exposure.

 

E.g: 1/15th + f/22, 1/30th + f/16, 1/60th + f/11, 1/125th + f/8, etc.

 

All of the above combinations will give the same exposure, but the resulting picture may look very different. They'll all have a different amount of depth-of-field, due to the change in aperture, and anything moving is going to be blurred to a different degree due to the time the shutter remains open.

 

An exposure table doesn't explain this. You have to experiment and see the effect yourself, or look at example pictures.

 

I'm learning as well, in a much more. haphazard, less structured way... and getting some results I like... as well as much good info from you guys (and gals?)!

SO, this above post I quoted leads me to the matter of "exposure triangle" although I guess the 3rd leg of this triangle (which isn't mentioned) would be the OP's suggestion that he is using ISO 200 film?

Thus far, in my own zig-zagggedy learning path, I have: used my digital camera to meter certain shots (with mixed result, not always or even mostly good); used a chart based around the "sunny 16 Rule" when outdoors (almost exclusively with good result); used my light meter with mixed result (probably I wasn't using it correctly when I got unfavorable result, possibly just lucky when I did get favorable result?).

Having only JUST found out that films have what I've learned is a "box speed" IE ISO 400 film = f4 @1/125... (as the example stated) I (think) I see what some of my shots have come out grainy? (IOS 160 film, some Ilford C41 B&W). Then again, I'm shooting whatever setting- making some attempt to record as much as possible in terms of conditions, subject matter, film used, etc - BUT just having the film developed by the lab normally, IE with no push or pull. My logic, however twisted is that I can compare shots to notes to see what worked or did not work; by not pushing, pulling, or otherwise altering the base of my technique, I arable to see what worked and what di not work.... In the end however, I have often failed to record every single shot's details, (I probably recorded ~50% of all rolls of film shot) and I have also yet to go back and compare the images to the notes in the examples where I did write everything down.

I do feel like I'm learning, after all and I'm still out there shooting film- although I do have a backlog of 7 (and counting) rolls to get developed. My goal, as much as anything else, is simply to have fun and exercise some level of creativity to satisfy my own self if for no other reason. Having said that, I have a theoretical project in mind that could end up being long-ish term, involving some travel etc.

I applaud the OP for making a solid attempt to be more studied or purposeful in his methodology... good luck with it all! I myself hope to take a class in B&W photography this winter or spring.

1. If eventually you will use a digital camera, you should learn with a digital camera. If eventually you will use a film camera, learn with a film camera.

2. You need to learn with accurate equipment. I have tried many bricks C3 and have never found any that is accurate (even though they are usable).You cannot trust the settings very much, especially the very old cameras. For example, take your C3 to a shop and ask them to adjust all the speeds and aperture to be correct and their answer will be "no way".

take your C3 to a shop and ask them to adjust all the speeds and aperture to be correct and their answer will be "no way".

In all fairness, this is likely true of any number of cameras made from the late 30s and up to the 1980s.