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exposure settings are for the ten light levels normally encountered. This way you're not a blind slave to
the meter.
Let's assume an F stop of f/8 and a ISO (film speed) of 400. Here's what these 10 light levels are and
the shutter speed that would be needed.
- a Sunny day outdoors — 1/2000 sec
- a hazy bright day — 1/1000 sec
- a bright cloudy day without shadows — 1/500 sec
- an overcast day, or open shade on a sunny day — 1/250 sec
- a heavily overcast day — 1/125 sec
- deep shade. The woods on an bright overcast day — 1/60 sec
- just before a thunderstorm or late on a heavily overcast day — 1/30 sec
- brightly lit store interior — 1/15th sec
- a well lit stage or sports arena — 1/8th sec
- a well lit home interior — 1/4 sec
Of course you would vary the F stop and shutter speed combinations to whatever would be most
appropriate. In the case of a home interior, for example, instead of 1/4 second at f/8 you might choose
1/30 sec at f/2.8. The point is though that these 10 brightness levels represent 95% of the conditions
under which we all do our shooting.
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an exposure reading instead of pointing the meter at the subject, as one does with in-camera and
reflected meters, you instead place the meter in the same light as the subject.
The hemisphere, or lumisphere as some call it, is designed as a 13% gray object and thus provides a
reading equivalent to that which you would get if you took a reflected reading off a theoretically
perfectly integrated scene, or a Kodak 18% gray card. (It really should be 13%, but don't ask!?)
The beauty of the incident metering approach is that you needn't carry a large gray card around with
you on location, and you don't have to worry that your subject matter — whether because of its colour
or reflectance characteristics, will give an erroneous reading.
On The Spot
A third approach after straight reflective and incident metering is spot metering. Strictly speaking spot
metering is no different than other forms of reflective metering. You point the camera or handheld
spotmeter at the subject to be photographed and take a reading. But interpreting the reading and
knowing what to read are the trick. From a practical point of view I regard it as the most useful form of
light metering practice.
A spot meter reads a very small area of the scene being viewed. In the case of a meter like the Sekonic
L508 it can read a variable area as small as 1 degree. While using a standard reflective meter, a
camera's built in meter or an incident meter is straightforward and doesn't requite much thought on the
part of the photographer, using a spot meter implies having an understanding of film latitude, contrast
ranges and other aspects of exposure control.
Most frequently a spot meter is used in conjunction with the Zone System. Rather that delve too deeply
into this sometimes arcane topic, here's an explanation of how to use a spot meter to both understand
and control exposure using the system's basic concepts. If this sparks your interest you may wish to
read the article on this site on a simplified zone system approach.
An Experiment
Try an experiment. Turn off the autoexposure mode of your camera and turn it to manual. If you don't
have a handheld meter use your camera's meter to take close-up readings of various parts of a scene —
the highlight areas that you want to hold detail and the shadow areas where you also want to have detail
— and then see how many stops range are encompassed. Can your film handle it? What's the average of
the two readings? How does it compare to the camera's integrated reading of the whole scene?
Now, take several exposures, at 1 stop intervals, making notes of what you're doing. Use transparency
film because you'll then be able to judge directly what the effects of varying exposure are.
Why do this? Because it will make you think about light, contrast and what film is capable of. Just
remember don't let the highlights become overexposed. Clear film contains no information and there's
little to nothing that can be done to salvage an overexposed frame. A bit of underexposure is always to
be preferred.
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