Meter the ground and the sky will find its place. Meter the sky and the ground will be a silhouette. So follow sentence number 1.
What do you do if the ground is in shade and you're also including a blue sky in the shot? You can easily be four stops difference which counts a lot if you're shooting chromes.
Meter the ground and the sky will find its place. Meter the sky and the ground will be a silhouette. So follow sentence number 1.
If you're using chrome and meter the ground to set exposure, you'll burn out the sky. You could do the second and get a silhouette. But some shots don't lend themselves to silhouettes. The ground just looks overly dark, just underexposed. Only a grad will give you the latitude to catch both areas.
I do agree with you that you have to use a light touch. If you use a grad with too many stops, then the light balance looks fake. One or two stops at the most should do it.
With slides no one cares about a burnt out sky. If you have to have both use color negative film.
I only use the terms for mean usable number of f/stops and avoid all the marginal cases.
What do you do if the ground is in shade and you're also including a blue sky in the shot? You can easily be four stops difference which counts a lot if you're shooting chromes.
But what is a “useable stop”‽ Even flat information deep in the shoulder can be useable.
Useable for specifically WHAT ??? - that's the crux of the question. One needs to appraise their own personal standards and esthetic objectives, as well as realistic printing capabilities. Some people don't mind serious color crossover issues or horrible out-of-bounds grain artifacts, and might even use that creatively; others can't stand it. Offset press applications geared to publishing will toss film in the trashcan or return it unused because they necessarily have strictly defined contrast parameters.
"Slides hold a lot more information in the shade, even if the film looks super dense" ... Yeah, so does a bank vault. The problem is whether you can crack the door open or not, and do so without blowing up the whole building.
Another analogy. 16 to 18 stops? Reminds me of the person who climbed El Capitan cliff in Yosemite, which is about 3500 ft high, but forgot he only had 200 ft of rope when rappelling back down. That started the saying that he had established a "speed descent record". He indeed got back down, but things were awfully messy at the bottom.
No one is talking about sloppiness or carelessness.Another analogy. 16 to 18 stops? Reminds me of the person who climbed El Capitan cliff in Yosemite, which is about 3500 ft high, but forgot he only had 200 ft of rope when rappelling back down. That started the saying that he had established a "speed descent record". He indeed got back down, but things were awfully messy at the bottom. Anyone who can get more than 11 or 12 usable stops out of TMY, without resorting to heavy-handed compensating development or minus-developing ("pulling"), which crushes the life out of the midtones, must be some kind of miracle worker. It's uncommon to even encounter 12 stops of range in nature, although I frequently do in the extremes of mountain photography between deep deep shadows and glimmering snow or glacial ice, or even around here in the extremes of deep wooded shade and glimmering shafts on light breaking through on bare white branches. The whole point of that long straight line is to employ it wisely, and not as an excuse for careless exposure. In fact, TMax film can be especially unforgiving of sloppy exposure and development. I shoot TMax (both speeds) all the time, in multiple formats. But it's the black and white film I necessarily most carefully meter for. And when I do work in an 11 stop range, I often need to mask to, to get full rich detail and tonality.
HP5 has a moderately long toe, and nowhere near as long a usable straight line as TMax. But the real winners were old 200 speed films like Super-XX and Bergger 200. Current Foma 200 also has an exceptionally long straight line, but won't except expanded development to anywhere near the same degree.
Pulling? Most color films don't pull well anymore. I've fiddled enough with Portra 400 in the darkroom to realize something is just off if it's abused with significant overexposure. Sometimes in photojournalism or street photography etc rules need to be stretched. But there is always a qualitative penalty. Just depends on one's expectations. It's makes a lot more sense to avoid a train wreck than clean one up after the fact.
Not correct, I'm afraid.
The colour response of the various dyes and colour couplers in negative film inherently have some deficiencies that cannot be engineered out. The mask provides a proportional compensating factor for those deficiencies which responds exactly to the image itself - the mask and its compensating factor varies with the colours in the negative. Then, when it is time to print, the effect of the mask can be reversed by simply filtering the result. The RA-4 paper or EF-P cine print projection film has that filtration built right in (along with inversion of the resulting colours).
Negative alone: - some colours are deficient, and colours are inverted.
Negative + mask: - deficient colours are compensated for, but overall single colour cast added, and colours are inverted.
Negative + mask + RA-4 paper/projection print film: - deficient colours are compensated for, the mask colour is filtered out and the the colours are inverted.
Voila, beautiful, natural colours!
Discovery and implementation of the technology behind the orange mask was revolutionary, and is the reason that negative + positive colour systems have a better chance to achieve colour accuracy than direct positive or positive + positive systems.
I'm not going to waste any more time debating you Helge. If someone want's to go dumpster diving to see what they can fetch out of the deepest darkest recesses of the container, that's their right. Rats and cockroaches make a living doing that, so it apparently works for some; but it's not to my taste.
Making a habit of it?You can frame anything as bad, by inserting expletives and negative modifiers.
Moderate compensating development and pulling is possible.
Alan, high-end pro scanners can go even deeper. And since you like to shoot Velvia, it's interesting that measurable density steps per se for that particular film do go down quite a ways. The problem is that none of that extra mileage down there into that black abyss is good for much of anything. It's largely extreme density blue dye with a much bigger dye cluster (grainy look) than what lies above, and is meant to reproduce as sheer black. If you try to print it lighter, it's gonna look awfully weird. But all this is academic anyway. Once you go down the pathway of scanning, most folks are committed to color inkjet printing, which has a terrible time with gradations of black. I won't go into the more exotic printing options. The whole point is just because "something" is there doesn't necessarily make it useable.
Clint Eastwood as Dirty Harry : "A man's got to know his limitations". Once one begins to do actual serious color printmaking, that remark suddenly gains a lot of relevance.
I can't even begin to compete with commercial options, Alan. To start from a 4X5 chrome, for example, and end up with a master internegative suitable for a stunning RA4 print, involves multiple film registration steps. Velvia is especially tricky. I'm printing some 8x10 internegs now; but those necessarily had to be generated on a batch basis during the right time of year when the humidity was stable for a couple months or so, or something gets out of register unless the original chromes are all on stable PET base, not triacetate. Quite a bit goes into it up front. The end result is well worth it; but the cumulative process ... $$$.
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