I took it as tongue in cheek but doubt it would have bothered me much anyway. I have heard it all.
Honestly though it’s an Interesting point. Im suspicious of any skill in photography that is subject to technological disruption. In the old days the ability to use a light meter well and decide from your e6 clips if you wanted to push or pull and by how much was an actual skill. Now we have 14 stops of dynamic range. So you see how useful that skill turned out to be. Technology definitely helped with this image under discussion. I have to acknowledge that although it’s not the whole story.
Out of interest the bee image was shot at 5000 iso I think at 1/4000. I figured sharp was more important than noise in this image. I am a bit surprised at how clean the image is. I did do some noise reduction in LR but that’s it.
You have touched on an interesting point with your remarks about meters.
In some ways, being dependent on one and using either Ektachrome or Kodachrome, one was able to develop a good eye for how contrast was going to play out, and that also helped one develop a personal style, because it led to the shooting (outdoors) at particular times of day just in order to get the light one loved.
Today, with all the differences, I'm conscious of paying too little attention to many aspects of a photograph, and just make it because I can and the tech permits it. Not good, actually, because it stops one considering many other aspects that make or break the look of an image. To be fair, I write from what's now a non-pro perspective; were I still working, the case would probably be different, and I'd still be using my old methods but projecting onto a sensor instead, so the product might not really be very different.
When I first bought a digital camera I did test it out against an incident light meter because I got the impression the aim was similar to transparency work: don't blow important highlights. In the end, I gave in to the ease of using Matrix (a Nikon option) metering which seems to be pretty good. That said, I rather suspect that I would perhaps get better files less dependent on post-exposure tricks if I'd continued along the external meter route; but hey, reality kicks in along with an undertone of "what diffence does it make" that saddens me at myself, a little - just a little.
