At 01:27 AM 9/3/2003, Chris wrote:
><snip>
>With a film camera you get around the problem of uncertain tonality, surely,
>by making an assessment with your meter and bracketing the exposure by however
>much you judge necessary. For me, bracketing is not second nature and I tend
>to average middle tones (or the ones that I think important to the scene)
>using the OM4's spot meter.
Hi Chris
I hope everyone saw my response to Walt. :-) The C-5050 is a great
little camera with interesting possibilities. But it can also be a
distraction.
On bracketing exposure, I'm a firm believer in Rod Planck's advice, to
get the exposure right first time and forget exposure bracketing.
Sometimes you don't get a second chance. Better to bracket composition,
angle of view, the moment, etc. than wasting shots with incorrect
exposure. Here are some reasons for not bracketing exposure, and there
are probably others:
- The best composition or framing (especially for a moving subject or
macro shots) or moment will not have the best exposure.
- It is better to be consistent with your approach to exposure so you
know what works. You learn more about correct exposure by knowing
what you did wrong. If you employ different ways to get exposure, or
bracket, and don't document what you did, you won't remember what
worked. Be consistent. (and use slide film :-)
- Best to know where you want your tonalities, down to a 1/3 stop, and
then put them there. Generally you expose for the highlights and let
the shadows fall where they will, since blown out highlights generally
make bad compositions. Meter a known tonality whenever possible.
- Bracket exposure only when the tonal range is outside of film range
and you may want different results. Like sunsets where it is
inevitable that some highlights will blow out. In such cases you want
to determine what should be medium tone in the composition, and there
may be more than one possibility, especially with film saturation
characteristics.
Well, that's my little diatribe on no exposure bracketing. At least
what I hope to live up to. Otherwise I should just get a wonderbrick
with matrix metering and automatic exposure bracketing and just blast
away rather than try to learn the fine art of photography.
The C-5050 can help or hinder. What I like about it is you can set it
up to operate in a lot of different ways. By restricting what it does,
controlling color balance, etc. it can be a nice learning tool, and it
even takes pretty good pictures. Left on automatic everything and you
don't have to think or learn anything. The best thing I like about the
C-5050 over most other digital cameras, next the complete control over
the camera functioning, is its battery life. I think Olympus did good
on that point. I hate most its shutter lag time, but I suppose that is
a tradeoff with battery life.
Wayne
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