Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 1999/12/22
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]Mark Rabiner wrote: > > I have seen documentaries and read about the great cinematographers at > work and I find it an enigma on the fact that they all seem to use > incident light readings. Could it be they never had an Ansel Adams? > Don't know. I can't see the logic. I think the logic is exactly what Mike was pointing out: If you measure the infalling light, tones fall where they will. It gives you consistency from shot to shot, something that is useful when you are splicing together different segments of film in the cutting room. Ansel Adams was not a cinomatographer. He's requirements were quite different. The challenge there was to squeeze out all the technical quality possible from a single sheet of film. This sheet of film would never be spliced together with others, serves only as an intermediary for the final print, and is typically viewed on its own. He exposed and developed each sheet of film separately, rather than exposing and developing 400ft of film at the time. The point of all this is that, for those of us shooting 35mm film which is, I guess, somewhere inbetween 16mm documentaries and Ansel Adams, we can use both methods depending upon which serves our purposes best at any given point in time. If you need to be quick on your feet, you need consistent exposures, you don't have time to measure the light for every single shot, you're satisfied with getting the kind of quality that an incident metering of the light and fiddling with paper grades will provide, then use an incident meter. If, on the other hand, you want the maximum possible technical quality, you can afford -- both from a time and money point of view -- to dedicate different bodies to different films, development, etc, and you have the time to measure the light for every shot, go with reflected metering. As always, there is no silver bullet, no magic recipe that will solve all the worlds' evil. You just have to know what you're doing and what the benefits and drawbacks of different options are. Then select the best one, for *your* particular application at *that* particular time. Seems pretty logical to me. M. - -- Martin Howard | Visiting Scholar, CSEL, OSU | What boots up must come down. email: howard.390@osu.edu | www: http://mvhoward.i.am/ +---------------------------------------