Hi, Frantisek wrote:
> **: BTW, I have never had good luck with spotmetering faces of dark to > black skinned people - what is the best zone to put the spot reading > on? I hesitate to get involved in this thread, but I wrote this reply before the thread sort of spiralled down a little, so I'd like to send it because it has some value and I have photographed an awful lot of black people. I've never had a problem with this, even with full-face portraits of very dark-skinned people. In general it's best, imo, to use incident metering, which is very accurate and is not affected either by subject reflectivity or by colour temperature, which I believe can affect spot-metered subjects. If you can't use incident metering then I'd recommend substitution metering, ie measure something that's close enough to 18% and in the same light as your subject. It can happen that the person's face is so dark that you can't pick out much detail. This tends to happen when you're shooting in bright sunlight and the scene is very contrasty. If your film can't handle the contrast range then you have to make a sacrifice - highlights or shadow detail. But this is not a metering problem, it's a film latitude problem. Solutions include using a film with wider latitude, and shooting in less contrasty conditions either by moving your subject into the shade, or adding some fill light with a flash (deprecated <g>) or a reflector. I've found the best conditions for photographing in Africa to be at the beginning and end of the day when the shadows are long, or during slightly overcast periods. The low sun, while still having high contrast, gives a brightness range within the capabilities of Kodachrome 64 and the colour of the light makes people's skin look really beautiful, imo. --- Bob - This message is from the Pentax-Discuss Mail List. To unsubscribe, go to http://www.pdml.net and follow the directions. Don't forget to visit the Pentax Users' Gallery at http://pug.komkon.org .
