“Expose to the right” vs “JPEG Histogram to the right”

[digitaldog]

Judging from the many of his prints that I've seen, I'd say it was. It was certainly more reliable than my eye.

A print informed you of the exposure of the neg? I think not!

[digitaldog]

I've manipulated images myself during my wet darkroom days, both during the film development process, by using the temperature of my fingers, and easier (because it's easier to see what's happening) by dodging and burning during the exposure of the print and again using my fingers.

Ah yes, the finger 'trick'. Trick because in my first trimester in photography school, everything had to be shot 4x5, B&W and all prints made had to be 'straight' with zero dogging and burning. The idea in those very old days was, we students needed to learn to properly expose and light and no print manipulation was allowed. Contact proofs on the back of the print board had to be supplied so the instructor could verify we didn't dodge and burn the 8x10 print itself. We fudged this all a tad using the wet finger trick; it did work unless we went overboard and the sharper instructor's would catch us. Then the mounted print would come back from critique with "Remake" on it. We had to start from scratch with the entire assignment.
It was a tough lesson and a tough first trimester but we learned to expose and light with little regard to darkroom manipulating.
Of course this was a good decade before anyone had any idea what Photoshop would or could be.....

[aderickson]

Ah yes, the finger 'trick'. Trick because in my first trimester in photography school, everything had to be shot 4x5, B&W and all prints made had to be 'straight' with zero dogging and burning. The idea in those very old days was, we students needed to learn to properly expose and light and no print manipulation was allowed. Contact proofs on the back of the print board had to be supplied so the instructor could verify we didn't dodge and burn the 8x10 print itself. We fudged this all a tad using the wet finger trick; it did work unless we went overboard and the sharper instructor's would catch us. Then the mounted print would come back from critique with "Remake" on it. We had to start from scratch with the entire assignment.
It was a tough lesson and a tough first trimester but we learned to expose and light with little regard to darkroom manipulating.
Of course this was a good decade before anyone had any idea what Photoshop would or could be.....

I never went to a photography school but I did go through a period of time where I shot only color transparencies for the same reasons.

Exposure had to be nailed and white balance only corrected through camera filters.

[donbga]

 

Polite is all that is required. Rude isn't.

Dave S

  Well shut my pie hole!

[Guillermo Luijk]

Glad to see the great interest in ETTR, I encourage you all in this thread to consider the possibility of signing for this CHANGE.ORG request to camera makers to include an option of having RAW histograms and RAW highlight clipping warnings, which would help a lot in achieving easily and quickly the perfect ETTR on our cameras:

http://forum.luminous-landscape.com/index.php?topic=124450.0

Spreading the link among your photographic community would be highly appreciated for all of us who would like to have such tools.

Regards

[Dave Rosser]

Not that I said Ansel was guessing but that depends what you mean by a guess. If he did make a guess then it was a very good guess because he was a very good photographer. I am not sure that he had an exposure meter in his plate camera or that he come up with the Zone System before the time of his earliest works. The Zone System was documented as a teaching aid for other photographers in about 1940. He did not need to bracket because he had skill and only about 12 shots available for the day anyway.

The point was that if you don't capture within acceptable limits then there is no amount of post production creativity that will fix it.

He certainly made a (very) informed guess for his Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico shot :- see http://anseladams.com/ansel-adams-anecdotes/

Dave

[BJL]

Minor White once described a photography outing with Ansel and Edward Weston. At Ansel's insistence, Edward was using a light meter.
Edward's technique, according to Minor, was to wave the meter around, then glare at it and mutter "It's wrong!"
Then he proceeded to set the exposure his eye told him was correct.

Here's the version from Adams himself (page 30 of The Negative)

I can recall seeing Edward Weston, who was not particularly of scientific persuasion, using his meter in rather unorthodox ways. He would point it in several directions, take a reading from each, and fiddle with the dial with a thoughtful expression. "It says one-quarter second at f/32, I'll give it one second."

But Adams continues

His approach was empirical, based on long experience combined with very deep sensitivity and intuition, and his extraordinary results speak for themselves.

[Eric Myrvaagnes]

Thanks for the clarification, BJL. I should have looked in my copy of The Negative.
I heard Minor's version in one of his workshops.
I agree with Adams' assessment of Edward's approach.

-Eric

[BJL]

Ansel Adams's technique was the complete opposite of "taking a guess".  The Zone System requires careful light meter measurements of multiple points in the scene, coupled with detailed knowledge of the response characteristics of film and developer.

Is it fair to say that the Zone System goal is to choose a placement of one level so that all other relevant levels of the scene fall as much as possible in the straight line section, rather than any important highlight or shadow details being too far onto the shoulder or toe? What I do not know of any film photographer doing is pushing the levels as far up the straight line section as possible, and then having to bring levels back down in development or printing. It was more "expose to the middle", with a very sophisticated interpretation of "middle".

There was of course a version of aiming for maximum exposure: using the slowest film that can get the job done.

[bjanes]

Ansel Adams's technique was the complete opposite of "taking a guess".  The Zone System requires careful light meter measurements of multiple points in the scene, coupled with detailed knowledge of the response characteristics of film and developer.  Modern digital sensors have greatly simplified the process of getting an acceptable exposure, and there is no longer a development process, as digital sensors have linear response curves.  The creative part of image processing is now in what Adams called printing, and what we call post-processing and printing.

It is interesting that Ansel Adams and the Zone System was brought up in a discussion of ETTR. When dealing with what he called a short scale subject (DR of the scene less than the DR of the capture medium) Ansel would let the high values fall on Zone VI rather than Zone VII so that the resulting negative would have less grain and "wasted density" while still capturing the full scale of the scene (see pp 68 and 69 of The Negative). Photon counting statistics apply to film as well as digital, but with the films of his time, I think that film grain would swamp photon noise. An analysis of photon noise as applied to modern film would be interesting, but of limited practical value because of who uses film these days.

Regards,

Bill

[xpatUSA]

with zero dogging and burning.

Excellent! A Freudian slip, perhaps?