To meter or not to meter...

[cajuncc]

Everyone has their own personal guidelines they are most comfortable with. In my mind developing your eye by guessing exposure settings to match your lighting is a valuable skill to practice.

This is precisely what I'm attempting to do here. I've tried practicing on cameras with built-in meters, but it's just too darn easy to check the meter. Not having a meter at all is forcing me to think about the overall light conditions from time to time, but outside that, I just worry about shooting. It's nice.

[E. von Hoegh]

Yes there are a fair number of guys around here, like you and Drew, that fall in a special class of artisans within our craft that may actually intend to print 10,12, or more stops of scene luminance range and use every bit of straight line between toe and shoulder. That is quite a feat, I'm not trying to make little of that work.

Sure you guys don't have any latitude but that isn't the norm in our world. Average scene luminance range is about 7 stops, if the film is capable of 10 there are 3 stops of room, latitude, to play with. 12 gets us 5 to spare, for the average Joe or Mark shooting portraits and family and wedding stuff, that's a lot of latitude.

The reason the 200 observers comment was included, as well as citing the exact reference, was to show that the idea that "more than one exposure setting can produce excellent prints" isn't unproven conjecture on my part. It's peer reviewed science.

Thanks, Mark.
The way I look at it, if I can't record it on the negative, it can never be on the print. And slide film is a special case, with only 5 to 7 stops of range depending on the film you use.

If I take a camera out for nighttime street photgraphy, you can bet I'll be hoping for some wiggle room - in this case to ensure I get printable negatives at all.

The safe approach for exposure is to leave yourself some room; if you are making a negative of a scene with say 8 stops of brightness range, why not put the exposure in the middle, so you get a stop or so of insurance on each end? Making a succesful print is like going through a series of doors, each one smaller. If the errors are bigger than the doors, you eventually get stopped before you reach your goal.

As for me, my printmaking hasn't quite caught up with my negatives. But when it does, I'll have the negatives.

By the way, I like the sniper analogy. My father was sniper in the 36th infantry division in WWII, I've been a target shooter for about 40 years.

[E. von Hoegh]

This is precisely what I'm attempting to do here. I've tried practicing on cameras with built-in meters, but it's just too darn easy to check the meter. Not having a meter at all is forcing me to think about the overall light conditions from time to time, but outside that, I just worry about shooting. It's nice.

When you have and use a meter, you still need to think about overall lighting conditions. The most valuable piece of gear you have is right between your ears.

[BrianShaw]

The most valuable piece of gear you have is right between your ears.

Nose? Tongue?

[E. von Hoegh]

Nose? Tongue?

Corpus callosum.

[TheFlyingCamera]

To return to a point in the original post, the OP mentioned having a metering app for his iPhone. In my experience, the free light meter app for the iPhone does a bang-up job of metering, provided you know how to use it. It's the rough equivalent of a 5-degree spot meter, and you can use it to very quickly determine the SBR of a scene by moving the metering circle around on the screen. It's not a Minolta, Sekonic or Pentax 1-degree spot meter, but it's something you can (and most likely will) always have with you. I don't know that I'd use it for metering really long exposures at night, but I haven't tried that yet. THOSE are scenes I do reserve for the good hand-held meters that I can calibrate.

[markbarendt]

The safe approach for exposure is to leave yourself some room; if you are making a negative of a scene with say 8 stops of brightness range, why not put the exposure in the middle, so you get a stop or so of insurance on each end? Making a succesful print is like going through a series of doors, each one smaller. If the errors are bigger than the doors, you eventually get stopped before you reach your goal.

As for me, my printmaking hasn't quite caught up with my negatives. But when it does, I'll have the negatives.
.

That is essentially what I do.

My prints have a ways to go too.

[benjiboy]

When you have and use a meter, you still need to think about overall lighting conditions. The most valuable piece of gear you have is right between your ears.

Ain't that the truth, a light meter doesn't automatically give the perfect exposure, the readings they give are a point from which to start considering how you want to depict the scene.