Metering with slide film

Hi all

 

The landscape section mostly are images, so I decided to post here. Please move if it is more suited elsewhere.

 

It has been 12 months since I have shot film. I took my medium format camera out with Fuji Velvia 50, and my Sekonic light meter with spot meter.

 

I have provided a photo taken with my smartphone. 1) I spot meter the water where the red box was and set that as my mid tone. 2) I then meter the sky away from the really bright area, the location with the blue box. 3) I looked at my light meter to make sure that it is within 1.5 stops. Does this sound correct? After the shoot, I thought if I should had metered the sky so the sky looked really nice with those colors but the foreground might had been underexposed. Like to know your views on this. :)

 

Second question - when I metered the foreground it is was 3 stop darker than the water. What can be done in this situation?

 

 

Thanks.

 

Edit. Oh maybe I should had instead meter the sky I wanted detail and then meter the foreground and then ask my light meter to average that out? Then check if the sky is within 2 stops range or I prefer 1.5 stops to be safe and the same to the foreground.

 

 

Edited January 25, 2019 by RaymondC

The problem with using a spot meter is knowing where to point it. Because it'll just indicate an exposure that renders that exact spot as a mid tone. Also the eye is very bad at judging brightness, especially with brightly coloured scenes such as that sunset.

 

Spotmeters can also have trouble isolating very small areas of high contrast. They have quite a crude optical system that can easily 'flare' adjacent bright areas into small areas of shadow. I had to fit an additional baffle to mine, and even now it's still not perfect. I gave up on using it for that reason.

 

Rather than use a spotmeter, why not use the smartphone? Adjust the exposure on the phone, or with another digital camera - and bingo! You have the exposure you want. Much better than playing poke-and-hope with a spotmeter.

 

A digital preview would also help to spot things like the awkward jutting branch that kisses the horizon. I'd have preferred to see a slightly higher viewpoint to bring the branch silhouette completely against the water.

Second question - when I metered the foreground it is was 3 stop darker than the water. What can be done in this situation?

 

- Nothing much, not with slide film. It just doesn't have the exposure range to capture detail in shadows and highlights in a sunset scene like that.

 

Colour negative film would get a bit more shadow detail. And digital capture with a good camera would have no problem.

 

Adding artificial foreground light like flash could look very contrived. Unless you had a large array of softboxes or similar and gently lit the whole of the visible shore. That would be the big-budget cine shoot solution.

 

With a very long exposure you could play a handheld light over the area - 'painting with light' - but I suspect the exposure for that scene would be too short for that technique.

Edited January 25, 2019 by rodeo_joe|1

I have done sunset pictures a number of times, probably different each time.

 

Yes, sometimes you expose for the sky and let the ground turn dark. You want all the colors from the sky to show up.

 

A little bit after the sun is down, but when the sky still has color (that you might not see so easily), you can

expose enough that the foreground isn't so dark, and the sky isn't so light.

Second question - when I metered the foreground it is was 3 stop darker than the water. What can be done in this situation?

 

Consider graduated neutral density filters, often abbreviated GNDs. There are many sources describing their use. Here is one.

As said, that's a REALLY tricky scene to shoot well with slide film.

 

In fact, I shot a somewhat similar scene on back in December on Velvia 50, and even with a 2 stop over/under bracket(based on meter readings from a smart phone app off the water and sky and basically splitting the difference to establish a base exposure) didn't get one I was completely happy with.

 

I'm not a big fan of grads in general, but this is one of those situations where they can at least pull out something a bit more usable.

 

BTW, the same evening I shot a series of the same scene with my D800. I metered off the clouds to keep them from blowing out, then just let the shadows fall wherever. The water and foreground came up VERY nicely with a simple levels adjustment, and I had a presentable photo with a couple of minutes of PP work. As much as I love film, scenes like this will make you enjoy digital.

 

I'll also mention the photo taken on Ektachrome E100 in an F4 that evening where I let the Matrix meter work its magic, and it actually came out as well as what I did with my Hasselblad and Velvia....but in reality actually retained a bit more detail in the shadows since Ektachrome is-in my experience-a bit more forgiving than Velvia(I've shot a lot of both Velvia and E100G over the years so know them well-E100 in my experience seems to be behaving similarly to the old E100G I knew).

The advice to use a digital device, such as a smart phone or a digital camera, as your "Light Meter" is good advice.

 

This same advice has been given by rodeo joe in different conversations.

 

It occurs to me that some folk might be 'stuck' in a practice of "I need a light meter" and not see the simply genius that a modern digital camera is exactly that, often quite a sophisticated light meter . . . usually with: a Framing Mechanism (zoom lens); a range of Metering Algorithms (Metering Modes); a Preview Screen; various Histograms; and Highlight Indicators . . . all of which are bonus interpretative tools which may be of assistance.

 

***

 

I concur that a GND Filter would be an elegant solution for that scene capture with Positive Film. GNDs come in various graduations. It is not necessarily a cheap exercise acquiring a quality set. Square GND filters that fit into a Filter Holder are the better suited for this type of work, this allows you to slide the filter up and down relative to the aspects of the scene.

 

WW

My experiences with slide film & metering were pretty simplistic...underexpose 1/2-1 stop - use metering other than spot. Worked pretty well for over 50 years.

Why ONE shot?

When I shot this kind of scene with slide film, I would bracket up and down from the indicated exposure. This is because I did not know which shot would have the exposure that looked the best, until it got back from the lab. Sometimes the best exposure was NOT what I saw, or thought it would be.

The problem here is not measuring exposure, its the dynamic range of the film you used. There are all sorts of ways you can measure light, and several of them will work in experienced hands. But none of them will alter the fact that there are many occasions ( and this is one) where the range of the scene is greater than you can accurately get onto slide film, particularly Velvia. So you're left with

 

• Using a ND grad over the top half or 2/3 of the picture depending on what effect you find most pleasing
  
• Using neg film which has a greater dynamic range
  
• Maybe trying fill flash on the foreground to increase exposure there
  
• Using a digital camera which combines wider dynamic range with (IMO) increased ease of adjusting exposures of part(s) of the picture in post.
  

On the other hand photography isn't just about blindly trying to correctly expose each part of the image so it looks just like it did to the eye. In your picture, if you get the foreground much lighter it's going to change the balance of the scene and what the image looks like, and not necessarily for the better. As the photographer, you have to choose what you want us to look at, and the answer might not be "everything".

 

(snip)

 

On the other hand photography isn't just about blindly trying to correctly expose each part of the image so it looks just like it did to the eye. In your picture, if you get the foreground much lighter it's going to change the balance of the scene and what the image looks like, and not necessarily for the better. As the photographer, you have to choose what you want us to look at, and the answer might not be "everything".

 

Yes.

 

As I just found out for a wikipedia edit, Kodachrome has about 8 stops that it can cover (a little into the curved parts at each end), but 12 stops of density.

 

If you are going out to photograph sunsets, then you might as well do that. The foreground will be dark.

 

But you can move the sky up the curve, just below where it curves over at the top.

The sky will come out bright, but with most of the color well represented.

The foreground will be dark, but not completely black.

 

If you meter for the sky, you will underexpose the sky, as meters assume 18%.

(Even though the sky isn't reflecting sunlight, the number is still 18%).

 

Increase the exposure 2 stops, metering on bright parts of the sky, but not

the actual sun, you might be about right for a bright, but not overexposed, sky.

I found Nikon matrix metering system work very well for slides. Otherwise I would spot meter the brightest part I want to keep details and expose by +2 EV.

Just a related question, more a reminder.

 

Something different.

I read some articles about grad filters. I have them but not used often.

The articles say if you the foreground to background is a different of 1 stop, use a 1 stop grad filter. If it is 2 stop, then use a 2 stop grad. Wouldn't that be within range?

Wow! Slide film. That was my go to, until I went digital about 2006. You can use a spot meter- measure the brightest and the darkest areas to see how wide a range you need, and then whether you can capture the entire range on a single shot. I think I remember slide film as having about 5 stops of usable range (not sure about that). Graduated neutral density filters help here. Once you pick an exposure, bracket brighter and darker to be sure to have a chance.

So much easier with digital...…….

To reiterate, the main difference in metering for slide film as opposed to (color) negative film is that slide film has much less "reach" (latitude, that is)-- that is, underexposed slide film will slip into black and overexposed areas will burn out.

 

In scanning mostly Kodachrome slides, I have discovered that you can sometimes recover detail in underexposed areas, but overexposure is usually unrecoverable.

 

For more than you want to know, do a Google™ for "Zone system"-- this is a way of determining exposure for what YOU want in a particular scene.

In scanning mostly Kodachrome slides, I have discovered that you can sometimes recover detail in underexposed areas, but overexposure is usually unrecoverable.

 

Yes, slide film is a lot like digital, especially older digital sensors.

 

With both slide film and a lot of sensors made in the mid-2000s and earlier, once it's gone it's gone. As you've said, a good scanner can often pull detail out of the shadows of slides, whereas even older digital would allow you to pull the shadows up some. Back in those days, too, you would often find that the different color channels would "clip" at different intensities, so you could end up with weird color fringing on the highlights-even with its more limited dynamic range, highlights on film often looked better since they would fall in the "shoulder" of the film and would both blow out a bit more gradually and somewhat more gracefully.

 

Of course, modern digital sensors can often manage 1-2 stops of highlight recovery, and a mind-boggling amount of shadow recovery.

mind-boggling amount of shadow recovery

 

Absolutely.