togalive said:
Manual all the time. Not because I think its "cool" but because I find it better suits my shooting style.
Is manual the "cool" thing? I didn't realize. Personally I bracket just about everything on aperture priority. I only use manual when I am in a situation where the light is guaranteed to be consistent...and I'm absolutely positive I have the correct exposure.
If manual is the cool thing I must be doing it wrong. I'm not "cool" at all!
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Maybe it depends on some background, too. I don't look at a scene and immediately turn to the light source, for me exposure isn't about what's available, but what's reflecting back at me, and what's reflecting back at me will determine how I expose. Now I know that cameras built-in meters have all these nutty multi-point evaluative modes, but I find that typically these modes under expose - not in a way that makes the image look bad, but in a way that under-utilizes the cameras dynamic range.
For me, I come from a traditional black and white film background. I prefer color, but expose for the shadows process for the hilights is engrained in me. In black and white film, this means you spot meter the shadows, decide how many zones below middle grey you want it to be and then meter the hilights to determine how long you develop the film according to your little charts you've made with a densitometer (in practice you just generic chart from ilford and say "meh, close enough").
So really, with the zone system, what the SUN is doing doesn't really matter. With slide film, I did the same, only I exposed for the hilights and let the shadows fall into place because I knew I wouldn't get any shadow detail and there wasn't much I could do about that anyway.
I spent a lot of hours trying to figure out what the best way was to meter in digital. Nobody seems to really know. I asked past professors and they never had a real good answer. It seems that people just kind of ignore the fact that nobody really has a consensus of how to meter in digital, and so they use the built-in evaluative meter and say "meh, good enough".
But this meter mode is not intended to give the best results, but rather the best LOOKING results. Sure, it's great if you're doing something at high speed in changing light - but evaluative meter modes make decisions about the scene on your behalf, and in every case except that which I mentioned you will end up with a sort of "middle of the road" result made up of the camera's engineers' compromises, not your own.
After many hours trying to figure out this problem of how to best meter for digital, that because "density" in digital is applied directly from the shadows without reversal, I found that you can go infinitely deep into the shadows and just make them brighter and ever brighter. So what I do is expose for the hilights and process for the shadows. To do this I spot meter the hilights, increase exposure to just below where they'd start to clip and then pull the shadows (if necessary - and it nearly always is) in post. I could meter the shadows and apply the processing in a specific way and I do have a method for this, but it's cumbersome.
So what I'm saying here though is that what the source light is doing doesn't play a roll in the way I shoot. I look for the brightest point in the scene where I want to preserve detail and meter it, regardless if this is right outside the frame from a similarly lit subject. For example, if I have a wide shot that includes the sky, I might meter off the white puffy cloud then if I look downward and see a cool shape in the ground, I might meter off the sidewalk. In both of these cases, I'll increase exposure to +2.6, about a stop below my absolute ceiling, and expose. But because the Cloud is significantly brighter than the sidewalk, if I used the cloud's reference the sidewalk would be under exposed. If I used the sidewalk's reference the cloud would be significantly over exposed. I could use middle grey for everything, but if I did that the lightest point in the scene would be accurate to the scene, but not to the photograph.
Photography isn't about what light is available, it's about what light is reflected back. While the two are of course related, you can't have reflected light without a source, this idea removes the fact that what "white" is doesn't so much depend on the source light, but rather on the context of the scene.
