Gerald wrote:
LG> Gee, how did anyone ever use slide film or do concerts/available light
LG> before spot meters came along???? Could there be another way????
Well, I for one had to go closer to the stage to take a full reading
or switch to my 200/4 just to do this. Too bad if the lights changed -
my exposure was off again and I had to guess or redo the dance.
Of course I managed to get some well exposed pictures, maybe one of
two, but now in the "spot" era I rarely miss any.
Bill wrote:
WR> Gosh, I regularly shoot slide film with no spot meter, Back in
WR> the primitive era, I used an camera with centeweighted metering
WR> to shoot Kodachrome, which is a notoriously twitchy film. Back
WR> in my concert shooting days, I did some wonderful work with that
WR> same dinosaur of a Nikon F2s under the most horrid lighting
WR> conditions.
How about this: Orwochrome UT18. It wasn't even E6 and its exposure
latitude was perhaps half of stop. I was fighting a Zenit TTL which
sometimes fell outside its meter range. And I still got decent
pictures.
WR> I hardly think that no spotmeter cripples a camera. In fact,
WR> for a beginner photographer, the spotmeter may well cripple the
WR> photographer. They do require some knowedge to operate properly.
WR> Anyway, I respectfully disagree.
Just a couple of reasons below to show why - in my humble opinion -
the CW demands more from a photographer and delivers less (and btw,
the colour reflectivity is just an issue with both spot and CW).
The problem with the centerweighted meter is that it usually
overexposes by 2-3 stops due to picking the darkness surrounding the
subject. It's nothing bad about it - hell, labs even love
overexposure. But you loose exactly those 2 stops that make the
the difference between a sharp and a foggy picture. Well,
overexposure is predictable - one may say - and can be compensated.
But what if there's a light in the subject's proximity - it happens
fairly often at the concerts. The center weighted meter goes then
berserk and there's no telling how to compensate.
WR> OTOH, if a camera has a significant part of the viewfinder
WR> covered by a display, or is so oversized as to be unhandy to
WR> use, that would, IMHO, be crippled.
I fully agree. Crippled is perhaps a too harsh qualifier for most
SLRs. But then again, some cameras are up to the task and some are
less. On the bright side: note how all posters in this thread were more
interested in ergonomics and exposure and no one considered a camera
crippled by say, autofocus. ;o)
Servus, Alin
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