Country Stone Barn

Sounds like a great idea with the scouts - catch them yound and make them think!

My son is already asking for, "a real camera, like yours, Dad". So, I've been trolling ebay for a good sturdy rangefinder or manual slr to start him out with.

Gma: I've never used a graycard; don't even own one. Are they useful in cases like this, where you have lighting extremes?

A gray card will work best if you have a spot meter. Otherwise, you'll have to move your camera right up to the card to get the internal meter to read it well (You'd need to fill the meter's sensor with the card).

Alternatives are to get an incident meter, but that's not the approach I'd take. There are just some things you can do by the seat of the pants. When it is a bright snowy scene, you can almost always open up a couple of stops from what the meter in the camera recommends to get the snow properly exposed.

More importantly, I recommend that you get Ansel Adam's book "The Negative", which describes the Zone System. That will help you really understand exposure at a level that you can use to really dial in your photos. The tool of choice for that system is the spot meter, which if you are going to do landscapes, you ought to purchase.

There are lots of other books, and info on the web, about the Zone System. Don't be intimidated by it - it isn't that hard.

In the mean time, it will help you to understand that all meters (except the most advanced meters in the latest cameras) calculate an exposure that will render *what the meter is point to* as a mid-tone grey (things get a bit more complicated in color, it's simpler to think about this in black and white). If you meter snow, it's going to come out grey if shot at the meter's recommendation. If you meter shadows, they will come out possibly brighter than you intended, and the rest of the scene may be over exposed. So if you meter the bright part of the scene, you have to compensate by opening up your aperture a stop or two, depending on the brightness, and if you meter the shadows, you'd compensate by closing up the aperture a stop or two.

That's simplistic, but can give you a start on understanding your meter.

You can tell me to shut up if you already know this stuff, by the way...

-chuck

Thanks Chuck:

What you wrote makes sense.

When I'm "out of element", like with sow scenes, I tend to rely on the cmaeras meter ot get me through. More often than not, it leaves me scratching my head. I guess the extremes confuse it as much as they do me...

My first read of an overview of the zone system had me numb and thinking that it was really for LF shooters. I guess I'll have another whack at it...

I won't have to wait for next winter to play, though...I'm guessing that the beach will pose similar challenges...c'mon summer!

Joey,
Here is a great site for the zone system.
http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/zone_system.shtml#exposurange
Remember that zone seven, eight are the brightest zones that will still show detail in them. As mentioned above if you meter the snow it will come out grey, so meter the snow and open the aperature one, or two stops or slow down the shutter speed one or two speeds. As a matter of fact I would bracket the exposures just to be sure.

I took a whack at shooting the barn again today. Not quite as much snow, but the barn is white washed, so the scene may still maintain some of the characterisitics as before.

I walked up to the brightest part of the barn and metered. I chose to shoot one frame at the meter's recommendation of f11@125. The next frame I decreased shutter speed to 60. The next frame I returned to 125 and compensated exposure by +.5 stops; then just the opposite. So, that amounts to four frames of my own new fangled bracketing...We'll see what happens.

I'll give Zone another go. Is there anything special to its application to small format?