Country Stone Barn

I'd be surprised if your guessed exposure is correct with the light being reflect from the snow and the extent of the dof. The most important thing is that people know snow is white and its difficult to get away with anything else. I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on this image and what it was you were aiming to capture?

I assume you used a test strip to determine your printing exposure. It almost looks like your paper is fogged. Beyond that the photo seems to need a center of interest or some other engaging element(s).

Two things really caught my eye about the scene.

One the barn has an interesting white washed stone face, which changes to stained wood near the top.

The second is the street which curls around next to and behind the barn, which tends to invite you down it.

I may have the exposure all wrong as I didn't write it down...

I don't think the paper is fogged, I think that I may have the aperture and time ratio screwy. I'm having the same difficulty with other prints as well (too dark).

How did you determine your exposure? In camera meter or did you meter it independent of the camera? What sort of compensation did you do for the snow?

-chuck

I used the camera's meter and focused on the shadowed/ wooded area of the upper portion of the barn. I must have went with it, because I usually record my manual settings and didn't this time.

Carl, your right about the exposure setting, it must have been quite a bit higher given the dof...I'm wondering if the meter changed the aperture setting when I brought the camera down to recompose.

Could this still be a result of my printing naivete?? I'm really just feeling my way around in the dark...If I recall, my aperture was set around f16 and I was testing in four or five second intervals.

I suspect the negative should answer that question for you (print or negative). This snowy scene is going to be difficult for an in-camera meter - generally with that much white you'd need to manually compensate. If your in-camera meter was in a spot mode, you'd have gotten much brighter wooded area - more like a middle grey. I'm guessing your meter is not a spot meter in the camera, and averaged around the wood/snowy roof/white siding, and calculated too dark a result.

Or, you didn't have an exposure lock engaged. In any case, if you had just metered the scene with the camera in the composition position and then opened up two (or three) stops from there (or increased your time an equivalent amount), you'd have probably gotten the bright snow you wanted.

Seems like you might be able to compensate for this at least somewhat during printing though.

-chuck

OK - just an idea: I think you may need to increase the contrast. You have no whites (bit of a problem with all that snow about ) - at least, none in the scan as it displays on my monitor. It is possible you are printing too dark in order to get decent shadows & blacks, but that is causing your whites to be too dark. Try grade 4 or more and print so the highlights are JUST starting to go off-white, ignore the shadows for now - just get a good time for the highlights. Once you have that time, look at the shadows. If the shadows are too light, increase the contrast some more; if they are too dark, reduce contrast (this is the old "expose for the highlights, grade for the shadows" mantra of darkroom work).

Good luck, Bob.

P.S. I really like the composition. If it works, it works!

Lots of good advice above Joey! There is a lot to try and remember about expoure and compensation - and rmembering to use exposure lock on camera to to put the settings on the camera manually but it does get a lot easier as time goes on. Follow Bobs advice re the printing stage and just do lots of big test strips on this print for a while to see how the exposing for the highlights and adjusting grades for the shadows. Lots of good books out there to help - even one by Les McLean of this group!! Find a friend that prints - we are all here to try and keep this art form going after all! Good Luck.

Thanks guys!

Bob: I'm going to try your advice as soon as I get back into the darkroom; can't shoot the scene over, for obvious reasons...

The people here really make the site. I'm glad that I surfed on one night and found such a cooperative community of photographers.

Carl: Alas, none of the adults in my circles have any interest in "real" photography; they're pretty much snapshooters (Even though they'll spend $1K on a digital camera to take them.) However, I'm slowly introducing a group of 9 and 10 year old cub scouts (my son being one of them) to analog photography. We're building pinhole cameras and will be developing our own contact prints in the near future. Hopefully, one or more of them will catch the bug, so to speak.

Thanks again. I'll let you know of the results of this little project.

Joe

When I have the rare opportunity to see snow I use a hand held meter and take readings from a grey card. If I meter the snow highlights the film will be underexposed. The averaging meter shows the correct exposure for mid tones - not for highlights.