#1 photo tip

[Fred]

Don't even bother taking a photo if you can't see the climbers face. I have 100's of proofs right in front of me to back that up. lol

[PH]

A$$ shots.

That's hot!!

[Fred]

I've made another important discovery. If you have no interest in photography than don't bother reading below. Advance to go and collect $200.

As we know, our light meters read reflected light off of objects but some objects reflect light differently. For instance, snow is white and therefore will reflect light differently than black rock (basalt for example). The light meter is calibrated to 18% grey which means if you aim the light meter at a piece of paper 18% grey you will get perfect exposure in that lighting condition. If you introduce a piece of white paper, the photo will be underexposed because the light meter will think there is more light than there actually is. Similarly, on very dark surfaces (say black), you will get overexposure.

So if you 'spot meter' (refer to web for more intense discussion) on something very white or very dark you won't have a very good exposure for your photo. Modern cameras feature matrix metering which is aimed to balance out metering by taking several points over the area and taking an average meter reading. This works nicely when you have tons of colours and different tones and shades but... what about a little skier on a white ski slope. Again, back to the white background. For this case the white snow takes over the average and you are back to spot metering on white canvas. To compensate you would generaly overexpose (say+1.0E) to achieve the real exposure. Ice climbing is the same problem.

What I discovered on my recent trip to France and hadn't run into that problem before is the 'dark' scenario. In Fontainebleau a lot of the photos were taken in dark wooded areas with very dark rock and very dark forest floors. The result, overexposure because my camera thinks there is less light than there actualy is. What does that mean? It means that the rock will appear brighter than it actually was but more importantly, the chalked areas and hands will appear very bright and hard to see detail because they are overexposed. What I should have done was set my exposure compensation (say -1.0E) as above for snow and ice but now in the reverse direction. Hope this will help others if they run into the same problem.

How to avoid all of this. Suck it up, pay the buck and bracket (multiple different exposures of the same photo) all of your shots $$$. Buy a hand held light meter which reads the actual light (not reflected light) and you will get perfect exposure everytime. Buy an expensive digital SLR that can bracket photos and has a wicked large storage space.

Another tip for digital users. You should try to achieve proper exposure for your photos instead of correcting brightness and contrass on existing photos (photoshop). This is not the correct way to take photos. Digital cameras also use light meters like on my 35mm but they are usually even less accurate or smart. If you are investing in a digital camera anytime soon I'd look for one that has a 'bracketing' feature. This means for every photo your camera takes it will take however many you want at say (-1.5E, -1.0E -0.5E, exact, +0.5E, +1.0E, +1.5E). Then you pick the one that has the best exposure and delete all the others.

Hope this helps.
Next week---> depth of field 101

[mitchleblanc]

Auto bracketing is nice, but doesn't it actually *take* all the photos? meaning you need to hold your finger down and keep snapping as it goes through all the list... not possible in the majority of cases.

I have the same problem with overbright rock, and my solution is simply to half aim at the sky and lock the exposure when it looks like it matches up with the "real" exposure. Of course, this isn't possible with your non digital camera, I guess.

A bug just walked across my desk, that's my cue to leave.

Mitch

[Fred]

there are more problems associated with digital such as white and color balance that I'm not very familiar with. I'd read up on those to understand a little more about your brightness problem. I'm sure your camera has white balance settings etc.

You are right that bracketing actually takes ALL of the 3 or 5 photos for the 5 different exposures. In certain photography situations you can do this (photo of castle for example) but can be more difficult for moving subjects such as climbers.

Aiming your camera at the sky also works for 35mm cameras. The light meter reads whatever you point it at. It measures the amount of light reflected off something. If you aim at the sky you will expose the film for that amount of light which means you will have underexposure climbers if you then turn it on them and take the photo for the same exposure. I'm surprised you haven't had that problem. A perfect example of this is trying to get silhouette shots. If you want to achieve this type of photo, simply face the sun, set your exposure while metering off the bright blue sky looking at the light, then introduce a climber and take the photo. Here is an attempt at explaining that a little more clearly. When you look directly at the sky, the camera sees a lot of light and tells you to shut the appature (like a squinting eye) so that you don't overexpose the film because there is a lot of light. However, when you introduce a subject in front, their back which is turned away from the sun, reflects very little light. Thus there is not enough light or a long enough exposure to properly expose the climber which results in a black silhouette with a bright blue sky. Try it next time you are out.

Remember that every photo has a real/correct exposure. The trick is finding it. Bracketing is a way of making sure you hit that perfect exposure.

Mitch, can you set appature and shutter speed on your camera? If yes here's what I suggest you try next time. Instead of aiming at the sky, try aiming at things that reflect the light from the same side of the subject as the photo you want to take. For example, if you want to take a photo of the front of the house that is in the sun don't meter off the back of the house but instead meter of the front of the house. If the house was white and filled the full frame a trick that photographers might use is to look at the front of the house, put their hand up and meter off the back of their hand. They also sell 18% grey cards to do this. It's not perfect but usually give you decent results when you are in a tricky situation like at the ski hill or in front of a big black boulder.

does this make sense?

[MMM]

You touched on white balancing/color balancing the camera... I will try
to explain
that:
When your camera has a white balance feature, what you do is hold up
something you know to be true white (not a shade of white, or the ever-popular "off-white") in front of the lens under the same lighting conditions as your subject, filling up the shot... and press the white balance button.  what that does is gives the camera a reference point,
where white is on the range of colors in that lighting condition.  It
then adjusts all of the other colors by the same amount it had to adjust the white.

"Why?" you may ask... well, before the dawn of digital cameras you had to use colored filters on your lens in different lighting conditions, ie. a blue filter when shooting under tungsten light (which gives off a yellow hue that our eyes naturally corrects for .. but film picks up).  The filter used would be the complimentary color of the lighting that it is correcting.  Traditional film normally comes set for normal daylight, same goes for slide film.  But you can also get slide film that is
manufactured to be correct for tungsten light, or fluorescent light, as
well as daylight.

Digital camera's are putting filter manufacturers out of business, as
digital cameras no longer need those filters, it can do it all for you with the aid of the white balance. The color temperature of sunlight varys throughout the day, closer to sunset the pollution in the atmosphere makes the light greenish to redish to yellowish.  At High noon sunlight appears to be the "whitest light".  Shade gives sunlight a bit of a blueish color cast.  Ideally you would set the white balance for every shot.  But for convenience sake, just do it every time you enter a different lighting situation.

Hope I have explained that one well enough.

[Fred]

so tell me if you think this analogy is correct. This is how I see it.

It's sort of like this. New age digital sensors can be adjusted to give you the type of film you want to use. Imagine the digital sensor as a roll of film but instead it's a little sensore like the toutchpad on your laptop that reads and records the incoming image inside your camera. So if you want a 400ISO tungsten film you set your ISO, white balance accordingly. Every film has a different chemical composition. With digital you basically make a fake chemical composition of film.

True?

On a side note. Here's some more interesting info for digital and 35mm users. For those of you who have 35mm SLR and plan to upgrade to digital SLR eventually, keep this in mind. The sensor is about half the size of a 35mm exposure frame. What does this mean. It means if you are spending lots of money buying wide angle lenses (say 17mm) thinking they will work on your digital camera you are right but here's the big kicker in the nuts. Your 17mm is now approximately a 34mm which is not wideangle anymore because of this 50% crop factor. Keep in mind when buying new lenses.

[MMM]

Good point.

[Fred]

MMM,

I have what could sound like a stupid question but here goes. Do you think it would be possible for digital SLR manufacturers to make (lets call it) relative matrix metering. Let me explain. On a typical 35mm camera the matrix meter reads several spots and takes an average but these spots if they are way off from 18% grey (as we discussed) won't be read correctly. Do you think it would be possible (once white balance is set of course) for a matrix meter to read and interpret colors and instead of metering relative to 18% grey it would correct based on the color at that spot in the matrix. It should work every time since we know how much red and blue and green etc reflet light relative to 18% grey?

[MMM]

Thats a really in depth question Fred!

I totally see where your coming from on this one, and yes... in an ideal world that would be the case... where the camera was able to interpret the scene in front of it, and adjust itself accordingly... the "Holy Grail" of photography! As it stands now (and as is my understanding), the heart of the metering comes from a light sensitive cell that can detect light intensity. Theoretically, you could have a light sensitive cell, with a filter (of the complimentary color to the color its detecting) for each color in a scene you are about to photograph.... and a little computer chip to process all that data into one beautiful exposure.... but with billions of colors out there, its just not feesable.

Now, there's always more than one way to "kill a cat" or "tip a cow" or however that old saying goes... but I think they all boil down to the problem of there just being too many damn colors out there to interpret.... and Artificial Intelligence still has a long way to go. the great Ansel Adams dedicated a great deal of time and effort into "finding the perfect exposure" He was able to do just that, which actually helped lead to matrix metering! He would meter several points in a scene, and average them out, unsatisfied with conventional light metering of the time. His techniques are still, in my opinion, the best and most thorough way to get good exposure... although sadly unpractical in todays "instant" world.

No matter how sophisticated cameras get... I think incident light metering will prove better than reflected light metering. (metering the light that falls onto an object, rather than measuring the light reflected by an object). You could save yourself some headaches and buy an incident light meter... you'll be glad you did. Go for the absolute cheapest one out there... you don't need extra features that cost more... as long as it reads incident light... really... thats all you need it for.

Hope this helped!
-Mike

[Richard Eh!]

A newbie question here...Not sure I understand the concept of "incident light metering".
Does this mean that while you are (potentially) tied off on a TR shooting a climber you would be measuring the available ambient light and making the leap of faith that your marginal proximity and the effects on light of the features adjacent to the climber will not be sufficiently disparate from the light conditions at the climber's exact position? If this is the case then camera man on arete or slab shooting climber in dihedral or concavity or chimney would be problematic, no?

[Fred]

incident light metering is measuring the ligth intensity directly from the source (the sun)

Perhaps this will help understand. Imagine having a model with sun directly in her face and then ask her to turn her chin 45 degrees. One cheek is now fully light and the other one is shadded. The light intensity of the sun hasn't changed but now it depends what you want to expose for. If you want to expose the sunny side you would hold the hand held light meter to that cheek. Similarly, if you want to expose for the shaded cheek, you would hold the hand held meter to that cheek.

So for you question about a climber in a dihedral. It depends what you want to expose for. If you want to see the climber in the dihedarl then you have to hold the light meter up to that cheek (shaded area). For example. See a photo of Ulysse on Catholic Gilrs on my website. If had of wanted to expose that small dihedral (dark shadow) below him I would either spot meter directly on it, or get a hand held incident light reading behind the shaeded corner (difficult to do like you suggested when you are climbing etc). And everything else would have been overexposed. So it's kinda difficult. If there is lots of sun and the dihedral is in the shade, I recommend cropping right into the dihedral so you only frame in the shaded area and then meter for the lighting in that corner. Otherwise, if you included the sunny stuff on the sides it will be overexposed.

[Fred]

Here's another example. See Red River Gorge photos on my site (photo022) Jeff is climbing in a very big dihedral on a super sunny day. However, from where the photo is taken, all that is included in the photo is the shaded dihedral so it exposes for that lighting. It's kinda like stepping into a seperate room and being shielded from the bright sunny day. However, notice that his face is still dark.

[martha]

However, notice that his face is still dark.

sheesh Fred, that is because he is 'the Aziun climber metro-sexual man'!!

[Fred]

No Cara. Actually I think it's because there is less light reflected off his face.

[MMM]

For the most part, and incident light meter reading will be more accurate, and independent of the colors and textures of the rock features around the climber, as it reads the light falling onto the climber as well as the rock around him. That light comes from the same light source.

Now, as for the practicalities of metering while climbing... Unless you are shooting slide film (which is less forgiving when it comes to exposure) or unless its a partly cloudy and windy day (where the suns intensity is constantly changing) then you can simply stand at the bottom of the craig, find a shaded area, meter that and remember that setting. Then find an area of un-obstructed sunlight, take a meter reading from that. Simply remember the two settings, and you should be close enough to the right exposure for a few hours! (except at sunrise/sunset).

cheers!