exposure mid tone

[toryw]

when it sais in books. meter the grey tones as grey.
does that mean when u meter something, u bring it to mid tone or u meter something in that frame as close to mid tone, then do what ever adjustments u want??

[kencaleno]

Originally Posted by toryw

when it sais in books. meter the grey tones as grey.
does that mean when u meter something, u bring it to mid tone or u meter something in that frame as close to mid tone, then do what ever adjustments u want??

To simplify things, for average (13%-18% grey-whichever of these you believe it to be) point camera at green grass or
Dry tarmac/concrete. For caucasian faces,spot meter face,then open up two ev stops. If you can learn the Weston/Adams Zone System,and you will have no problems.Ken

[toryw]

weston/adams zone system? whats that.

you know that open up 2 stops, and such as snow, find white tone then open up 1 - 2 stops John Shaw supports.

Jim Zuckerman disagree with this, he uses both handheld meters incident and reflective alot..

so just find mid tone using cameras meter or handheld, all's this means is just find what looks mid tone to me then adjust accordingly. Apeture, shutter, etc??

Thanks

[teaking]

Your Camera has a built in light meter which it uses to try to expose your image as you already know as your reading your books. There are different metering modes and your camera does the same thing in all modes which is try to make everything average... soo sorry if im repeating here lol

To use the zone system by adams all your doing is to find an average colour in the scene which are usualy Green Grass, Blue Denim Jeans, Postbox Red, Some skin tones like Asian Skin Tones. And then you set your camera to spot meter and meter off the average colour exposing it to be 0 this is easier to do in manual mode as in other modes you have to set the EV adjustment...... Ohhhhh and when your done dont forget to meter your highlights and check there not going to blow out

[toryw]

im having a hard time put this into words, i know it when i do it just couldnt explain it to someone.
So if im taking a picture, take the meter reading and set it to Mid tone which is 0, then u just set ur camera to mid tone?
Thats if ur camera mid tone is true mid tone, if not recalibrate it with a grey card?

what do u mean dont forget to meter your highlights and check there not going to blow out. just take a meter reading of the highlights and just see how they will exposure with that ttl meter bar?

I hope this all makes sense,

Thanks

[TerryMC]

A camera meter is a reflective meter. Most separate meters are incident meters.

If you meter a mid-tone (18% gray) object with you camera meter then white is white and black is black. It is the same as taking an incident meter reading.

However, the exposure range maybe outside the sensor range so you have to check for highlight clipping to recover details in post processing.

[toryw]

oh i see, so ur saying like your eye we can capture only about 5 stop range right? so if it registers over that then the highlights will over or underexpose.

On my d300 i only have 3 stops each way from mid tone so somewhere inbetween i want the highlights to be at right but how do i know if its one or two stops past that 3 stops in either direction past 0?

confusing,

[TerryMC]

Some people use "exposure to the right (ETTR)" method. Google it.

[toryw]

more googling, alright.
iv looked it up its kinda confusing, upping iso....

[zjs3]

I just recently learned about pushing the histogram to the right in another blog. The explanation makes sense about how the most info in the image is stored in the right side thus giving you the most info to be able to manipulate later. Fine. I get that. But I also read though in Tom Ang's digital photography master class book that you should expose for the highlights in that with digital you can recover a shadow using dodging but you cannot recover anything from a white spot. But are both authors essentially saying the same thing which is "expose for the highlights"? I found myself lowering my exposures to get no blow highlights in the review and then brightening later w/ curves. Also of note, the article says that the histo to the right technique is best or only works when your shooting in RAW.