On Mon, May 14, 2012 at 4:28 PM, Larry Colen <l...@red4est.com> wrote: > One thing that I don't understand is how a handheld light meter would work > significantly better with digital than taking a photo and looking at the > histogram. Or, for that matter, if it's an important shot, why not just > bracket. Drop $100 on a light meter, and that will buy you a terabyte of > storage. Plus, if you bracket in digital, you always have the option of > combining the frames in post production.
I can't argue with your logic, Larry. Oh, of course I can. :) Firstly, I hate this line of arguement because it implies that one need not learn the principles of photography if one can only take enough bracketed exposures of something. The problem is, that many subjects are captured in a moment of time and the timing of the moment of exposure is essential. (Simply mashing down on the shutter button and shooting 5 fps *might* capture that same moment [or one close to it] but again it might not. Similarly, one could shoot video and extract a frame and call it a photograph but I wouldn't call such a one a photographer. The more automatic things become, the less today's photographers need to learn & understand in the individual components (building blocks) and how they inter-relate & how they apply to capturing a given scene or situation. Even in digital, a lot of people don't understand what they are giving up as they crank up the ISO. (I'm thinking that we could make a similar argument to Larry's in explaining why we no longer need tripods, we can just crank up the ISO to get the shot. But clearly there are great benefits that will be visible in an image taken at a lower ISO - especially if it is a wider dynamic range scene that we are trying to capture.) Secondly, not everyone wants to spend copious amounts of time in post-processing. Theoretically, we could bracket every shot we take and later combine them using HDR (or whatever pseudonym you prefer). Which works pretty well, as long you have the time and nothing was *moving* in the frame. Thirdly, you can bracket all you want, as long as you weren't pre-visualizing a certain amount of motion freezing/blurring (since bracketing by changing shutter speed is going to affect that) or you desired a certain amount of DOF (since bracketing by aperture is going to affect that). In fact, your combining of images is going to sacrifice something in one department or the other when you blend. I'm not quite sure why so many of today's photographers are so willing to sacrifice time in the planning/pre-visualizing/taking stages of photography, but then so willing to spend that time (and more) in post-processing. I think it may have something to do with being more comfortable with the computer than with the camera. -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
