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Metering for digital

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Metering for digital

  • carl
    Participant

    I was reading about “zone metering” today and was very interested in a technique for landscape metering which read as the following:

    “Take a meter reading from the sky or the brightest part of the sky and dial back (-) two stops for your shot. This in theory should allow you to expose the sky without blowing out the highlights and give you enough latitude to bring up the shadow areas without too much trouble.”

    What I am interested in is, do you have any special techniques for exposing any particular scenario or any tips you would like to share for exposure in general?

    andy mcinroy
    Participant

    Carl,

    I find that that digital metering is a doddle compared to the old days of using Velvia. In those days not only did you need to use good judgement (especially when using grads) but you also had to bracket around that judged value to make absolutely sure.

    My own approach is to “expose to the right”. Those of you using RGB histograms have a slight advantage here because you can ensure that none of your channels are clipped. It’s a useful feature but by no means indispensable.

    This is what I do in all my tripod based landscape photography, regardless of content.
    1. Take a preview histogram with no filters and using the standard matrix metered value.
    2. From this histogram I can usually judge the correct ND grad to use.
    3. Place the grad and take another preview histogram
    4. From this histogram I judge the exposure correction required to push the histogram to within 0.5 stops from the right.
    5. Make the final exposure and perhaps a final tweak if needed.

    Andy

    carl
    Participant

    Andy,
    Interesting methodology for selecting and using the ND grad.
    Thanks for sharing.

    v4honda
    Member
    ciaran
    Participant

    carl wrote:

    What I am interested in is, do you have any special techniques for exposing any particular scenario or any tips you would like to share for exposure in general?

    I wrote a thread on metering which you can find in the portraiture forum here: https://www.photographyireland.net/viewtopic.php?t=392

    The same article can also be found on my website: http://www.thewonderoflight.com/tutorial_exposure.htm

    Funnily enough, most hits coming into my wesbite seem to be from people googling exposure. Hope this helps

    PeteTheBloke
    Member

    Funnily enough, most hits coming into my wesbite seem to be from people googling exposure.

    Might I dare to suggest that they forgot to turn SafeSearch off?

    Thorsten
    Member

    v4honda wrote:

    Why you should expose to the right

    One needs to be careful when following this technique as it’s based on a luminance histogram. There is every possibility that one might overexpose the red channel if one blindly follows this technique without a liitle bit of thought. If one has separate R, G & B histograms, then of course there is less risk of this occuring.

    ciaran
    Participant

    PeteTheBloke wrote:

    Might I dare to suggest that they forgot to turn SafeSearch off?

    :lol:

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