Hi guys, so i was just taking photos of this beautiful scene here. that's Mt Hood
And i thought that it would be a good moment to show you really quick how i meter for my photos, the photos i take
With the film camera of course and why i do it the way i do it
So the first thing that i used to meter my photos was a smartphone app
I think there are a ton of them and all of them are pretty good and they are accurate enough
the problem for me and that's why i stopped using them is that they don't give you too much flexibility and
Also to be honest i don't like
to be messing with my phone while taking photos with the film camera, it kind of ruins the experience
I don't know if it makes any sense
So then i bought a standalone old minolta light meter that i think i showed here before
I used that thing for two days it's not that i didn't like it it's not that it was not accurate
but it was just not for me
you see? i carry a lot of equipment with me: the bronica is a heavy camera and the lenses just
make it worse and then I have the tripod, filters, film... and then I have this camera
the 6500 that is the one i use to record these videos, so it's yet another thing to carry with me
so it didn't work for me
took me a while but i finally realized that i had been carrying with me the perfect light meter all this time, and it was the
digital camera and i want to show you why
okay
excuse the squirrel
I'm gonna use my old a6000 to show you how I meter. i of course usually use the
6500 but i'm using it to record this video right now so yeah
One reason why i like to use the a 6500 is because it has a switch here on this wheel to switch between
custom modes, and i use it to have a custom mode for video and another custom mode for photo
so this is what the custom photo mode would look like in my
6500 i always have the iso set to 800 that's the
Speed that i shoot hp5 at but of course i'll change it if i'm
if i'm shooting a different film or different... if i'm pushing it or something and
What i do is i just point the camera to a subject like these trees
and i just copy or carry these settings that the camera is telling me
1/640 and
f11 to my film camera
but getting these settings, the shutter speed and the aperture is something that you can do with
With your phone is pretty accurate at doing it but the camera has some key advantages
The first of them i don't know if you can see the screen but it's
previewing the image in black and white and i shoot black-and-white, so i can actually see
Kind of what the photo is going to look like
another reason is because not only we can preview the phone in black and white but we can preview the actual exposure
meaning, just imagine that we want to blacken the trees with no details in the trees
So we could use this exposure compensation dial and just turn it down all the way to say
three stops
And we will get a preview of what the look the photo would look like. not that we want to do that
We could do the opposite though if we want to blow out the sky and we want to have a lot of details in the
trees and just look the
How many steps we have to compensate the exposure to have that and that translates in in new settings
That we can carry to our film camera again and the last reason is this one
it's all about previewing the photo again
now just imagine, this is our image that's image we're gonna take
We have a shutter speed of one - one thousandth of a second, and the iso that we want
But, we want to have more contrast, we want to darken the sky so we could just place the filter here in front of
our lens
and we will get once again
a preview of the photo as
you can see the sky is darker now and the most
important thing of all is like we get new
settings: we have a high speed of 1/400 of a second now that we can carry and copy to our film camera
You see how it changes? 1/1000 1/400
Not only we get the settings but we get the preview the effect that the filter is gonna have in our photo
And yeah that's about it that's the method i use to meter. it works perfectly fine, my photos are
correctly exposed
all the time using this cameras light meter of course i did some testing at first i
copied the exact settings the camera was telling me and i took three shots one
With the actual settings, one under exposed by one stop and one overexposed by one stop
And then i checked which which one was the best one. it was actually the one with the actual settings, so i trust this camera
Alright just one last thing i wanted to add to all this
and it's while i use the settings from the camera 90% of the time sometimes i
overexpose the photo a little bit. for example if the camera is telling me f8, I'll use f7.1 or even f5.6
depending on the situation because digital cameras have a really hard time with highlights
film is the opposite, films struggles with the shadows
for example if you take a raw file from your digital camera
and you open that raw file with lightroom and you move the slider, the shadow's slider
all the way to the right you are able to recover a lot of detail, it's not gonna look awesome
but the detail is there. i've tried with raw files where i thought it was completely black and lost the shadows forever and
lightroom was able to recover a lot of detail, crazy detail from the shadows but that doesn't happen with the highlights
so if you blow out the highlights they are gonna be white
Forever and ever that's why the digital camera is gonna try to be safe, it's gonna try to expose for the highlights
you don't need to do that with film. actually the opposite you should be exposing for the shadows if that's what you want, you might
wan, to darken the shadows or you might not want to have details at all the shadows, but if you want
to have details on both shadows and highlights
you should expose more for the shadows with
film, so either you modify the settings in the camera too to do that to expose for the shadows or
you just trust the camera and overexpose a little bit. it works perfectly fine for me that way so
yeah, and that's about it thanks for watching and see you the next one
but sometimes though if in really bright on the frame like the sky the sun or something i know
So yeah i do this