I’m getting back into shooting color and re-collecting a set of Singh-Ray ND grads. I got a 2 and 3-stop filters. Curious thing is when I read an area with my Pentax digital spot meter and then put the densest part of the filter over the meter the 3-stop has 2 stop difference and the 2-stop has only one stop difference? Anyone else ever notice this??
I thought the point of a spotmeter was a narrow (2-3º) angle of view.Spotmeter has a big lens. So it’s collecting a wide area to focus.
It's probably focused at or near infinity. Right in front of the lens, it will read a wider area.I thought the point of a spotmeter was a narrow (2-3º) angle of view
So I heard back from Singh-Ray and they do check every filter with a densitometer. So I’ll just assume all is well. Probably just something I’m doing wrong, or flare like Drew mentioned. Just thought it was strange, when I meter though my B&W ND filters they are right on as advertised.
The densest part of the grad ND filter really doesn’t even make it down into the image area unless the horizon is really low in the frame. So therefor near the horizon a 1 or 2 stop soft filter really isn’t holding back much light at all.
Nope flare isn’t consistent, I mean you’re right. A Pentax Spotmeter V is kind of old school and has more flare than a newer digital spotmeter. My example is a worst case scenario to illustrate the point.
You should try to reduce flare to give the film the best chance of having excellent image quality.
But unless you put the two-stop Galen Rowell graduated neutral density filter in contact with the film, you will not reduce the exposure of any part of the film by two stops.
It’s like holding a piece of cardboard in a creek to control some of the flow of water, sure the downstream side of the cardboard will be lower, but your hands are going to get wet.
So why do they call it a 2-stop (grad) filter? Marketing? There are truth in advertising laws, after all. Would people be less prone to purchasing one if it were called a 1-stop or half-stop grad?
Galen Rowell was a machine-gunner, and told his workshop students the same thing - burn as much film as you can, and bracket it. He threw away around 99% percent of his slides. A co-worker and backpacking pal of mine lived right next door to him and saw him do that repeatedly. A lab owner who was a friend of mine printed all his early work. He had neither a good technical handle on what he did, nor was much of anyone to emulate when it came to esthetic choices. He just happened to travel to some interesting places and document those sites in a manner another local characterized as "National Geographicky", which pretty much sums it up well. It worked in relation to travel and climbing stories, SUV ads, ski posters, etc. Rather briefly, when Bill Atkinson was handling and printing scans of his best work, they came out reasonably well, but after that ... the already fishy fakery of the manner he used grads fell clear off the cliff itself with added blatant PS re-colorizations. He was providing stereotypes of what uninformed people wanted to see; but those of us who knew the real mountain light could spot the difference in a heartbeat.
Exactly the point I made in my last post and why Rowell used a 35mm and bracketed. You're actually confirming how smart he was, and entrepreneurial. He didn't sell large prints mainly but made photos for magazines. So a 35mm was good enough. Light also to carry. While he did shoot for climbing magazines, he also shot more generally for mags like Outdoor Photographer and even had a column there and made many photo books like Mountain Light. He was very respected in the industry and he and his wife lost their lives very young in a plane crash. We should celebrate other photographers' successes. He led the way for many landscape photographers after him.The light in the mountains can change so very fast, especially in the "magic hours" of sunrise and sunset, that there simply isn't time to fiddle around. I remember running into an aspiring pro landscape photographer in the Wind River Range once, who brought along his 4x5 Tachi folder along with 7 lenses and more than 20 Wratten gel filters. I brought my Sinar 4X5 and exactly one lens, a 210, and two glass filters at the most. When the evening magic hour came, I bagged several really nice black and white as well as color shots. Then as the light faded, I packed up all my gear so I could get back to my campsite before dark. Meanwhile, the other fellow was still fiddling around trying to figure out the best option between all his lenses and filters, didn't even get around to putting his camera on the tripod yet, and finally gave up when there just wasn't enough light left. Less is more.
Galen got sponsorship funds by promoting certain things. I don't think Fuji would have given him a lot of free slide film if he hadn't preached machine gunning. But that was, in fact, his own mode of shooting. Around the same time, I equipped my nephew with a little Pentax MX and single standard lens for sake of his own budding expeditions to the Arctic, Andes, and Himalayas. Those were all totally sponsor-funded, mainly by North Face and Sierra Designs. The strategy was simple. Even with a cover shot for a climbing magazine, there was always "accidentally" a North Face logo on the sleeve of a jacket in some corner of the foreground, with some drastically remote place in the background; or a Sierra Designs logo on the edge of a porta-ledge tent fly way up on some hitherto unclimbed big wall. Esthetics had little to do with it.
Galen made most of his money on stock photography licensing for sake of SUV commercials and so forth, and very little on print sales. His timing was fortuitous. Nowadays, advertisers want adventure video content, but not stills much anymore. They want someone speeding up to the edge of a cliff in a dust cloud in one of their SUV's, strapping on a Utube head device, then jumping off a big wall in a bat suit, then the TV audience seeing just a red splatter at the end. Times have changed.
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