Correct Exposure
It might not be what you think it is.
On the Beach Behind the Film Camera.
The camera is on the tripod. The darkness of the night begins to creep away from the growing light in the east.
The scene before me is beautiful and changing. Clouds billow on the horizon above the ocean. Tidal pools in the foreground start to reflect the light.
The aperture is at f22 for deep depth of field. The Portra 160 should capture the colors beautifully.
All is right in my little slice of the world.
Except for one thing.
I am concerned about correct exposure.
With a digital camera I’d take a shot, look at the screen, adjust the shutter a couple of stops and take another shot or two until I was satisfied. Easy.
A film camera is a delayed feedback device.
Results are not known until long after the shot is taken. The feedback from film developed in a week or two is only helpful for future decisions.
I wanted to get the correct exposure. But what does that mean? What is “correct exposure?”
The School of Hard Knocks.
I recall standing in front of a counter in a camera store peering through the glass. I was thirteen and wanted a Pentax MX. I wanted it very badly. My obsessive personality was shining through then like it sometimes shines through now.
The Pentax MX is a fully manual 35mm SLR film camera with a built in exposure meter. When you look through the viewfinder you see shutter speed and colored lights on the right side (without the words of course):
Holding the camera, I asked the salesclerk how operate it. He said focus it and then adjust the dials until you get the green light. Okay. Easy. I could do that!
At home with the Pentax, the user manual seemed to support the salesclerk’s instructions:
The second sentence of this and the salesclerk defined correct exposure for me at the time.
Why on earth would I want to intentionally overexpose or underexpose? After all: “Green means go!”
Of course, the store clerk was wrong and the MX user manual saying the exposure is correct on green was wrong. I didn’t know that at the time but I learned the hard way.
I’d develop a roll of Tri-X Pan and some of the shots would look great. Some would not. At first I didn’t understand why. I continued shooting and developing.
Over time I came to the realize that the meter was simply not as smart as I thought it was.
Correct exposure was not always the same as getting the green light.
The examples accumulated. Putting the MX meter on green did not make snow white, it made it grey. Out on the beach the sand was not as white as it should be or the bright sky looked dull. Backlit people we properly exposed sometimes; sometimes they were simply dark shapes in an ocean of light.
I connected the dots… to make the snow white I’d have to keep the shutter open longer or use a bigger aperture and none of those adjustments would put the meter in the center on green. For the backlit subject that I would want detail in I’d have to overexpose from what the meter indicated! For the backlit subject that I wanted to be a dark shape I would intentionally underexpose from the meter readings!
Back to the Beach Behind the Film Camera.
Standing behind my camera before the coming dawn, billowing clouds and reflecting tidal pools, I pointed my spot meter at the ground and for a reading.
I wanted the ground to be very dark. I did not want it to be a middle or light tone. I reduced exposure from my meter reading so the ground would come out darker than it was to my eyes.
If you were next to me on that beach with your camera, you might have really wanted the ground to look lighter than I did. Easy enough. Use your meter to get a reading on the ground and either chose to use that reading or add some more light by giving it a longer exposure than your meter reads.
The beautiful thing is that neither your choice nor my choice about correct exposure of this scene is wrong so long as the outcome is consistent with the choice. The choice about how to expose a scene is simultaneously technical and artistic. The choice helps make photography worth pursuing.
Correct exposure means getting the the amount of light onto the film that renders the scene the way you want it to look.
Correct exposure is not the same as centering the meter or trusting the auto exposure in something like a Nikon F5 or Canon AE-1. Centering the meter or using AE will get you an exposure that is an average for the scene or part of the scene. You might want that and you might not as part of your artistic choice.
Exposure is a key artistic and technical choice in photography and the light meter is simply a tool to help make that choice.
I’ll expand on each step in later articles, but if you want to be in control of your photography you have to take control of the artistic and technical process. That means (1) selecting and viewing a scene and imagining how you want it to look on film, (2) metering, (3) deciding whether and how to diverge from what the meter reads to render the scene the way you want it to appear.
Today I wrote about correct exposure so there would be a foundation to some future editions of Behind the Film Camera. Thanks for reading!
Hope to see you next time when we will explore handheld light meters as tools for creative photography.
By the way, do you disagree with something I wrote? Do you have something to add? Just want to chat about film photography? All comments welcome!