💾 Archived View for zaibatsu.circumlunar.space › ~solderpunk › phlog › look-ma-no-lightmeter.txt captured on 2023-01-29 at 16:10:56.
⬅️ Previous capture (2020-09-24)
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Look, Ma! No lightmeter! ------------------------- The most important factors in taking a good photograph, in order, are something like having an interested subject, having a good composition and only then getting technical matters like focus and exposure just right. So, this post is all about the least important part. Since I got into photography about three years ago or so, I have only ever used cameras with lightmeters in them - that is, a small electronic circuit which measures the amount of light falling on the camera (usually through the lens, except in very early models) and compares that to the ISO rating of the film to figure out a combination of shutter speed and aperture which will result in a good exposure. For the most part, getting a good exposure on a camera with a lightmeter is just a matter of adjusting your settings until the meter tells you you are in the good zone and then you shoot. Piece of cake. Of course, cameras are older than this technology, so in the Good Old Days, Real Photographers had to look at what they were shooting, think about it and Just Know for themselves what the correct exposure settings were. The more mortal amongst them relied upon a rule of thumb known as "Sunny 16". On a sunny day, when your subject is in direct light, you set your shutter speed as close as you can to the reciprocal of your film speed (e.g. 1/500s for ISO 400) and then your apterture to f16 and you're good. If you want to open the lens up a bit more you'll need to choose a faster shutter speed. What do you do if it's not sunny? Then you need to estimate how many stops darker than sunny it is and adjust accordingly. I've kind of wanted to try my hand at this for a long time. Of course it doesn't require a camera without a lightmeter, you can just ignore the lightmeter that your camera has, but where is the fun in that? Some time ago to my surprise at a local thrift store I came across a FED-3 Soviet rangefinder at a reasonable price. I had been curious about these cameras for a long time and so I got it. Very shortly thereafter I was generously gifted an earlier, but IMHO superior, model, the FED-2, by pkotrcka[1], who is probably the Lord of Rangefinders in gopherspace. These are very rudimentary entirely mechanical cameras with no lightmeter whatsoever, so a great opportunity to practice using Sunny 16! I took an awfully long time to put my first roll of film through the FED-2, but last week I finally dropped it off for development and scanning. I am pretty happy with the results! There is no great art in there, and many of the shots are imperfect in some way. But the vast majority of them either have really good exposure, or are within one stop of good exposure. Which means I didn't fail miserably at my Sunny 16 judgements, and with a bit more practice it seems likely that I will be able to shoot confidently without a lightmeter. This is a very liberating feeling! A lot of good old cameras have lightmeters designed to work with old mercury batteries, which are now banned for environmental reasons in most of the world. They need to be used either with comparatively expensive modern substitute batteries with sort lifespans, with external lightmeters (nowadays a lot of people use phone apps for this, but there are none in FDroid so that's not an option for me) or without a lightmeter at all. Some early lightmeter cameras don't need batteries at all because their lightmeters use selenium cells which are kind of like tiny solar panels, making the meters self-powered. This neatly sidesteps the problem of obscure old batteries, but the problem here is that the efficiency of selenium meters degrades with light exposure, so old cameras which have been carelessly stored with the meters uncovered for decades can often be inaccurate. Several times in the past I have encountered otherwise appealing cameras for sale in one of these categories and put them firmly in the "too much hassle" basket and moved on. I realise now that with just a little practice these kinds of camera can be very usable in non-critical applications. Maybe it's not a good thing, though, that I have one fewer excuse to