   |
Hi,
This weekend I was photographing and old headstone in a nearby cemetery. The headstone was uniformly illuminated (I checked carefully) by bright northern light from a cloudless sky. The headstone was light granite. In zone system terms it would have been a 6 or so. I intentionally threw the background out of focus and as it was dark foliage for the most part, I ignored it when metering on the grounds that no matter what happened to it, it would always be darker than the headstone and thus make it stand out.
What I did was take an incident reading from in front of the headstone and call it a flat 5 stop scene. I then metered using the appropriate ASA for such a scene. I have yet to develop it, but assumed at the time that I would give it the extra development a "flat" scene calls for. As I understand it, what I did was intentionally underexpose. When I develop I will extend development to compensate for this.
My question as someone new to the BTZS is this: am I completely confused? Is this what I should have done, and if not, how should I handle such an exposure in the future? Could/Should I have metered the background and subtracted that EV from the headstone's, which might have given me a SBR of 7 or 8 for the whole scene and exposed accordingly? Or will what I do produce the same (or similar) end result.
Please pardon the ignorance of a recent convert to the BTZS.
Thanks,
Paul
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
