Re: A final thought about reciprocity failure with paper negs.

At 06:34 AM 11/30/01 -0600, you wrote:
>The more I thought about this the more I realized that, with very long
>exposures, the risk of overexposure is lessened by reciprocity failure,
>and the longer the exposure, the less the overexposure risk. In essence,
>it is far easier to fatally underexpose than fatally overexpose, and far
>more efficient to overexpose and then work backward from that than vice
>versa.

In the context of low light, long exposures, that pretty much reflects my
attitude. In the case of natural light, the light can become a moving
target. An exposure started late in the day is getting less light as you
move into the evening. Even if I take a light meter reading that tells me
I need an hour exposure, I know that there will be much less light in an
hour, so I just let it go until I finish dinner, or remember close the
shutter - maybe 4 hours, maybe all night. If I don't think I got enough
light from the time I began until dark, maybe I'll let it go into the
morning light for a "while". I don't think much about reciprocity
effect. But then, a lot of my exposures don't come out. And that's ok,
too. I learn new things or get new ideas from the failures as well as
successes. Precise calculations can be useful, but exploration can be more
interesting.

:) Gregg

_____________________________________________________
Pinhole Visions at http://www.pinholevisions.org
Worldwide Pinhole Photograhy Day at http://www.pinholeday.org
Received on Fri Nov 30 08:20:41 2001