Congratulations you have just discovered why I tell people to
use sunny-11.
Green grass is usually very close to 18%. But I would not change
your camera meter settings until I tried it with slide film.
One of the problems w sunny-16 is that when it was the way to
meter film speed was rated one stop lower than it is today. No
they didn't improve the film, they just changed the rating. The
difference is that before meters were common the film makers had
a one-stop safety factor in the film speed. That allowed the
film to be over-exposed one stop, or under-exposed two stops and
still get a printable negative. Modern negative film has a wider
range than that so sunny-16 is usually close enough. If you are
interested this change took place in 1959, we photographers do
like to keep up to date <f>.
Slide film while it has more latitude than in the old days had
far less than negative film, plus it never had the safety factor
so sunny-16 is pretty close to correct and a good way to check
your meter to within about a stop. So if you get a properly
exposed slide with sunny-16 and your meter reads within a stop
of that you can probably trust the meter. For closer than that
you need to have it calibrated by a good repair shop.
--Tom
Hernan Mouro wrote:
>
> Yesterday, I read in Shaw's "Closeups in Nature" how to calibrate the
> camera's meter with sunny 16, and I found amazing that you can actually take
> pictures without using a meter, I think I'm veeery sloooowly starting to
> understand Shel!
>
> However, today I tried (it can't get sunnier than today here in Kansas), it
> was about 10:30 am. I set the camera to ASA 100, f16, and 1/125 (am I doing
> things right?). I switched to spot meter (my camera is a ZX-5n) and set my
> 28-80 lens to 80mm (I had to adjust the aperture to show me f16 in the
> viewfinder, since it's a variable aperture zoom (am I still right?).
>
> I had a hard time deciding what was "middle gray". The concrete of a
> sidewalk should me -1/2 in the meter, the grass -1, a brick wall -1 1/2.
> Switching to multi-segment consistently showed me -1 pointing to what I
> think was
> average light compositions (some sky, some buildings, some trees, some
> grass).
>
> Does this mean that I should set the camera to underexpose 1/2 to 1 stop by
> default? I know, I should try bracketing some slides and see how the "real"
> results are (I never shot slides), but does this make any sense so far?
>
> Thanks!
>
> Hernan Mouro.
>
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--
Tom "Graywolf" Rittenhouse
Graywolf Photo, Charlotte, NC, USA
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