Digital

       Dilemmas

Hugh McLean-bsme, thb.

Digital and Meters

One of the most significant things that I have noticed in making the change over from film to digital relates to the exposure accuracy. Shooting weddings with a Hasselblad with no meter was really not much of a problem. Most of the time both the flash and the lens were set at f11 anyway. Outdoors on a bright day in open shade at f11 and1/125 and the flash is a fill. Indoors the flash becomes the main and the setting is the same. Available light in the church was f4 at a 1/4 - what more is there to it? The lab compensates for exposure and color corrections anyway (+2 -1&1/2 stops). Ok - I’m oversimplifying this - but the point is that you get used to shooting certain situations and when you repeat it enough times - you pretty much know what you can expect from the lab. Make a contact sheet of the negatives from those nice prints you got from the lab and soon realize just how much of a crutch the lab really is. With digital you no longer have the ‘crutch’ from the lab, so you have to nail the exposure as close as you possibly can.

Built in metering systems in cameras have been improving significantly, in the past couple of years, and the change Fuji made from the N60 Nikon body to the N80 Nikon body was huge. Sure, you can set the camera to ‘P’ (programmed mode) and the flash to TTL and blaze away, and many of the exposures will be fine. But - what happens when they aren’t? The camera uses a reflected light meter which in essence is setting the exposure to an 18% gray card. It may do it by average, by spot, by 3D matrix - regardless which mode you use, the meter is seeing 18%gray. So what? Ok, now suppose you are shooting the groom and groomsmen who are all wearing black tuxedos. The camera thinks they are all wearing 18%gray suits and you have just blown the exposure because now the faces are over exposed by 1+ stops and have no detail at all to work with. The bride and bridesmaids are not quite so bad because the camera will underexpose them and they can possibly be salvaged. TTL flash is another thing that can absolutely kill you if you don’t use it correctly. Automatic may be really neat - but who is in charge - you or the ‘automatic’ settings. Knowing what the camera equipment is doing and having confidence that the exposure is correct is the name of the game. Setting everything on automatic so it frees you up to be ‘creative’- is not much of a benefit if the exposures are not usable. So now what? Set the camera on ‘Raw’, bracket 3 stops - and get about 20 images for a wedding?

Seeing the light and knowing when to meter incident, when to meter reflected, when to meter by spot, when to use fill flash, and when to use direct light is what makes you a professional anyway - so really - the digital camera actually forces you to become a ‘better’ photographer.

I am a meter ‘junkie’! Whenever a new meter came out - I probably bought it. I used the defacto standard Minolta IV-F for a long time - until the Sekonic L-608 with the RT chip - came on the market. The 608 is easily my all time favorite meter in spite of a number of things I wished it had. My old Gossen Luna-Pro was one stop more sensitive on the low end, but since I don’t normally shoot by moonlight, the 608 works fine. The meter is important to me because probably about half of my exposures are on the ‘manual’ setting and my arms are getting too short to see the histogram on the camera back. The meter can be set to display half stops like the camera, but since I need to set my lights to +/- .1 stop, and the meter wont display .1 stop settings when the half stop display is on - I don’t use the ½ stop display.

Where is the null?

Part of trick in getting the best exposure is making sure your camera and meter are saying the same thing. I make several exposures of a test chart - (I use the MacBeth), and determine which is the most accurate of the exposures - sort of like determining the ISO when you develop your own film. Then I bias the camera settings of the built in reflected camera meter to the test that I have made, and then bias the meter to the camera. My Fuji S1, for several resons, was biased (-.3) stops and the Sekonic 608 (-.4) stops. The S2 has a much better metering system and seems to be more accurate so I have no bias on either the camera, the ambient meter or the flash meter.

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