keeping notes; photographing at dusk

Leonard wrote:

>> I know, from working years in a camera store and teaching photography
>> classes, the following: Lots and lots of picture takers talk and talk
>> techniques to death and never making any prints. The only way to find
>> something out is to TRY IT! In regards to reciprocity failure and
>> development times, make a lot of negatives and TRY different combinations of
>> times. Keep really good notes. Your memory isn't going to cut it. This
>> way YOU'LL KNOW more than 90% of the other people out there. You'll know,
>> you'll learn and you can put this small problem behind you forever!
>> However, for those who love technical discussions, have fun while the rest
>> of us make pictures.

I have just started this practice of keeping notes on every exposure. I have
a little black book that I keep with my camera stuff and I write down the
date, the subject matter of the exposure (sort of), the subject brightness
range, sometimes where I placed zone III and VII (like "bottom of tree
trunk=III, white cow=VII"), and how many seconds or minutes I exposed it
for. This really helped when I was trying to figure out the speed of HP5+
for me, and helped me close in on correct development times.

One problem I ran into yesterday: I started an exposure around 6:30 pm and
according to my calculations it was to be 20 minutes. When I came back 20
minutes later, the scene had changed a lot. I metered again and it was two
stops darker in the shadows! So I figured a new time for that amount of
light and averaged the two, which turned out to be 80 minutes. Went away
and of course it got darker some more while I was gone. It was plumb thick
dark when I came back. I developed that film tonight and sure enough, it
was underexposed.

I guess you could say the moral of the story is, don't try to make a picture
when it's getting dark. But, that's when the wind dies down and leaves stop
moving around. It would be nice if there was a way to figure exposure when
the light is constantly changing.

--shannon

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Received on Thu Jun 27 22:43:56 2002