How to meter properly.

baachitraka · Apr 29, 2011

aaronmichael said:
You have a lot more control over these things if your own processing and printing. If you're sending it out and scanning negatives then that's a whole other thing. If you're doing your own processing, exposing for the shadows and developing for your highlights is a general rule of thumb. Of course this can't be applied to every scene. Also if you're doing your own printing then you might try burning in your sky if there is information there.

Do we need a spot-meter for landscape photography? I am looking forward to have a hand-held meter pref. mechanical one...

2F/2F · Apr 29, 2011

baachitraka said:
Do we need a spot-meter for landscape photography? I am looking forward to have a hand-held meter pref. mechanical one...

I would argue that spot meters are actually pretty lousy meters for general purposes. To make them shine, you need to practice precise placement of tones. They are very, very, very far from idiot proof. When you just point them at what you want to meter for, meter, and set your camera from them directly, you will get terrible exposures, due to the fact that it is a reflected meter; it tells you how to make whatever you point it out middle grey. (Incident meters, on the other hand, tell you how to make middle grey into middle grey every time. They are not fully idiot proof, but they are darned close.) With a spot meter, you have to make a deliberate decision about how to tonally render a specific part of the picture with every shot.

Of course, if placement on tones is how you want to work, they are an unmatched special-purpose tool.

jerry lebens said:
It's been said here many times : The 'sunny 16 rule' doesn't work in Northern Europe.

I know works in the USA but there's lots of places where it simply doesn't hold. Please guys, stop repeating it here or at least qualify what you're saying more carefully. Once a beginner has latched on to this idea, it can be very difficult to dissuade them of it and as a consequence it tends to make them suspicious of further advice - mystifying photography rather than clarifying it.

There are very few things said on APUG that are plain wrong. Disagreements here can usually be put down to different yet equally valid approaches. Sunny 16 isn't like that, it doesn't work in a large slice of the world and should be treated with great caution.

Sunny 16 is not an idiot-proof magic bullet, nor do I think it is often presented as such. (Nor does it mean that you must use f/16 if it is sunny. If you want to use f/8, then do it, and speed up your shutter twice.) It is just a starting point. If the conditions are not truly bright and clear, then you need to open up some. If you go into the shade, you open up 4 to 5 stops. I don't think anybody ever said that it was simple or idiot proof. In the hands of someone who doesn't know how to judge light for its intensity and quality, it's a disaster, of course. Give any rule to someone who takes it 100% literally and absolutely, and results will be bad.

Take sunny 16 for what it is (i.e. a starting point for one's own analysis, not a fundamentalist view of the Gospel of Saint Eastman), do your own testing, and you are fine. Just like any starting point. It is better than nothing, and I would argue that it is better than an in-camera reflected meter most of the time. But like anything, experience is the real tool that matters.

Though not as widely used of a term, I prefer to say "basic daylight exposure (BDE)," as it does not get into people's minds that they must use a certain f stop.

jerry lebens · Apr 29, 2011

2F/2F said:
I would argue that spot meters are actually pretty lousy meters for general purposes. To make them shine, you need to practice precise placement of tones. They are very, very, very far from idiot proof. When you just point them at what you want to meter for, meter, and set your camera from them directly, you will get terrible exposures, due to the fact that it is a reflected meter; it tells you how to make whatever you point it out middle grey. (Incident meters, on the other hand, tell you how to make middle grey into middle grey every time. They are not fully idiot proof, but they are darned close.) With a spot meter, you have to make a deliberate decision about how to tonally render a specific part of the picture with every shot.

Of course, if placement on tones is how you want to work, they are an unmatched special-purpose tool.

Sunny 16 is not an idiot-proof magic bullet, nor do I think it is often presented as such. (Nor does it mean that you must use f/16 if it is sunny. If you want to use f/8, then do it, and speed up your shutter twice.) It is just a starting point. If the conditions are not truly bright and clear, then you need to open up some. If you go into the shade, you open up 4 to 5 stops. I don't think anybody ever said that it was simple or idiot proof. In the hands of someone who doesn't know how to judge light for its intensity and quality, it's a disaster, of course. Give any rule to someone who takes it 100% literally and absolutely, and results will be bad.

Take sunny 16 for what it is (i.e. a starting point for one's own analysis, not a fundamentalist view of the Gospel of Saint Eastman), do your own testing, and you are fine. Just like any starting point. It is better than nothing, and I would argue that it is better than an in-camera reflected meter most of the time. But like anything, experience is the real tool that matters.

Though not as widely used of a term, I prefer to say "basic daylight exposure (BDE)," as it does not get into people's minds that they must use a certain f stop.

In northern Europe, it's a very, very, bad starting point. So bad, in fact, that it belongs in the same category as chocolate teapots.

For a novice, learning how to use an in camera reflective meter properly (by measuring off a mid-tone) in typical northern European light will give better results in practically all circumstances.

I don't have a problem with anyone saying 'this will give you a 'ball park figure' in the USA, where the quality of light tends to be different. Elsewhere it merely serves to confuse.

Diapositivo · Apr 30, 2011

Jerry, what do you observe in Brighton?

Here in Rome what I see is that the normal condition of sunny day, no clouds, is read by the lightmeter as 1/125" @ f/11 + 1/3 at ISO 100.

Only very occasionally the lightmeter reads 1/125" @ f/16 and I can't figure what the difference can be due to, unless the pollution problem has became really awful. Maybe sometime there is some thin veil of high-altitude clouds that is not well visible to the naked eye. One would expect that the highest values would be reached at noon, but I have to make some more observation to see if that's true.

I would agree that people using negatives should rather use a sunny f/11 rule, also in the US that is.

Rome is a 41.5° North, Brighton is at 50.8°N, there should be no practical difference. When the sun is 35° above the horizon, it is 35° above the horizon at any latitude. But sunny 16 always seemed to me to be a bit too "closed" an exposure, that's probably also your experience.

Pumalite · Apr 30, 2011

I'm with "2/F 2/F"; nothing replaces experience; which is not 'what happens to you', but is " what you do with what happens to you"

Lee L · Apr 30, 2011

Diapositivo said:
Rome is a 41.5° North, Brighton is at 50.8°N, there should be no practical difference. When the sun is 35° above the horizon, it is 35° above the horizon at any latitude.

On Dec 22nd or so, the sun never gets higher than 15.5 degrees or so above the horizon in Brighton, even at noon. In Rome, it's more like 25 degrees. Yes, 35 degrees is 35 degrees, but that's immaterial if the sun never gets there in your location. Even if it's sunny, December in Brighton is like the 'golden hour' all day long. That's a lot of difference in terms of both the angle of the light and in the amount of atmosphere (and dust and water vapor) through which sunlight passes. Add in the characteristic climate and there are significant differences.

Lee

wiltw · Apr 30, 2011

Diapositivo said:
Rome is a 41.5° North, Brighton is at 50.8°N, there should be no practical difference. When the sun is 35° above the horizon, it is 35° above the horizon at any latitude. But sunny 16 always seemed to me to be a bit too "closed" an exposure, that's probably also your experience.

We should keep in mind that Rochester NY, the home of the 'great Yellow Box god', is relatively northerly in the USA at 43 degrees latitude, Seattle is 47 degrees latitude, Miami is 26 degrees latitude, and that cities like San Francisco are about at the beltline of the USA yet south of Rome at 38 degrees latitude.

I am close to SF, and at 08:30 PDT in late-April, I just measured at ISO 100, 1/100 f/16 +0.1EV with a Minolta Autometer Vf inceident meter.

MattKing · Apr 30, 2011

The biggest thing that "sunny 16" does for me is keep me "grounded". By that I mean that when I'm immersed in making fine adjustments to my exposure settings to take into account all the factors that I might want to consider, it gives me something to check the result against, to make sure that I haven't allowed myself to go completely off track.

For someone new to questions concerning exposure, "sunny 16" can provide a reasonably accurate benchmark and reference that is much, much less confusing than many of the technical references.

It's always entertaining when I realize that after making any and all of those adjustments, I've just ended up at the "sunny 16" exposure .

By the way, here in the rainforest at almost exactly 49 degrees latitude, for half the year "sunny 16" works on many days, while for the other half year the question becomes "sun, what sun?".

Jeff Kubach · Apr 30, 2011

Of course if you print yourself, you can burn in the sky.

Jeff

Diapositivo · Apr 30, 2011

I know the "sunny f/16" rule as being applicable only when the sun is more than 20° above the horizon (based on the fact that when the sun is high enough, its shine is basically the same in summer and in winter). That takes away all the early morning and the last couple of hours before sunset, during which the sunny 16 rule is not applicable. In winter, I agree, it's of no much use as the sun is easily not high enough to make the rule reliable, also here in Rome.

It also becomes dangerous as the eye adapts and does not detect the fact that the sun becomes "less sunny" in late afternoon, the 20° corollary is important to keep in mind.

puptent · Apr 30, 2011

And I was going to ask if he has compared his Olympus meter reading against another camera, or meter...

baachitraka · May 1, 2011

puptent said:
And I was going to ask if he has compared his Olympus meter reading against another camera, or meter...

Today, I tested again sunny f/16 with olympus and it was precise.

EV 15: Subjects in bright or hazy sun (sunny f/16 rule)

ISO 400: f/16 and 1/500 sec.

How to meter properly.

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