"Just after getting my OM-4, I went on a trip to Chile. I dutifully
spot-metered about 750f my shots using a linear polarizer. Almost
every one of those shots was 1-3 stops overexposed, and all are of
course irreplaceable."
Like many people on this list, I'm past the half-century mark. In high
school I used a slide rule, not a pocket calculator. (They didn't
exist.) The great thing about slide rules is that they force you to
determine the magnitude of the answer before you begin the calculation.
You might make a mistake in the actual calculations, but you'll never
make a mistake on the exponent.
The same thing applies to photography. Even though I usually shoot on
automatic, at the start of any session I check to see if the display
shows a "reasonable" exposure. In bright daylight, the exposure is f/16
at 1/ISO. Under fluorescent light, it's usually f/2.8 at 1/60 for ISO
400.
In this case, the user should have noticed unusually slow shutter
speeds. They ought to have been a tipoff that Something Was Wrong.
Simply removing the polarizer would have shown a much greater reduction
in exposure than the approximately one stop that would normally occur.
The moral (and I'm sorry to have to say it) is that just because the
camera can "think" doesn't mean that we should let it do all the
thinking.
As long as I'm "lecturing" -- there are still submissions with HTML
coding. And it would be nice if people pared down their replies so that
only the minimal amount of the original e-mail needed remained. (In some
cases this would be the complete posting, of course. But it doesn't hurt
to strip out the group stuff at the bottom.)
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