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Do you always underexpose with the MM?


snooper

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Hope I’ll find the proper wording for this, but the more I see MM pictures, the more I find them slightly overexposed, almost all of them. The pictures are very nice, don’t get me wrong, but I always thought B&W photography was more about black than white. Meaning if your blacks are spot on, you can have tolerance for the whites, while the way around is a bit more complicated unless you are looking for a specific effect.

 

I use the MM with -2/3 in daylight, and -1/3 when it’s getting dark. I’m sure I could live with one stop underexposure. When I look at the nice pictures found in the photo section of this forum, I can now spot the MM users just by the bit of overexposure I think I see. It is probably very subjective and maybe it’s because I’m getting old, but I was wondering if I was the only one seing this.

 

Thanks for sharing your experience!

 

And Merry Christmas to all, by the way :)

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Hope I’ll find the proper wording for this, but the more I see MM pictures, the more I find them slightly overexposed, almost all of them. The pictures are very nice, don’t get me wrong, but I always thought B&W photography was more about black than white. Meaning if your blacks are spot on, you can have tolerance for the whites, while the way around is a bit more complicated unless you are looking for a specific effect.

 

I use the MM with -2/3 in daylight, and -1/3 when it’s getting dark. I’m sure I could live with one stop underexposure. When I look at the nice pictures found in the photo section of this forum, I can now spot the MM users just by the bit of overexposure I think I see. It is probably very subjective and maybe it’s because I’m getting old, but I was wondering if I was the only one seing this.

 

Thanks for sharing your experience!

 

And Merry Christmas to all, by the way :)

 

Merry Christmas too!

What do you mean with underexpose? That depends on what your meter measures in the subject no? So I do not work with exposure compensation in de SET menu, because this is always about a supposedly average 18% gray in the centre of the image.

I assume that the lightmeter is correct (I tested that at the start), but the 18% grey assumption is not always correct. So I expose for the highlights to be not blown out. I can always lighten up the shadows whereas I can never restore blown out highlights. If you shoot at 320ISO you can always 'develop' to 5000ISO. If you shoot at 5000ISO the results can be ok, but you will have the noise with it.

Btw I do not recognize your observation of Monochrome photoos on this forum, they are quite diverse

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Yes! I try to do that, because you can always lift the shadows but never recover the overexposed parts. I do a lot of landscapes and then the sky is critical. I also use an Orange filter if it is sunny. I have had my MM for almost a year now and overexposure is still my most common technical mistake.

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In another thread I referred to a MM test series I made. While I don´t really share the OP´s ability to ´spot the MM users by the bit of overexposure´ (;)), the test results help me conclude that it is far easier to overexposure than to underexposure when using the camera´s own meter.

Edited by elgenper
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I knew it ! :D I would not be able to explain exactly...

 

I'm not challenging or discussing how does the MM meter senses light. Maybe if we take an example it would be easier.

 

So I just went out with a December light, we are 3 hours to sunset and everything is really soft.

 

In order to exclude meters discussions, I used the sekonic to average the light on the front of St Eustache church in the center of Paris, one of the most amazing BTW.

 

Mr Sekonic tells us for ISO 320 1/125th of sec and between f:8 and f:11.

The M typ 240 meter says the same, BTW. Lucky am I, the MM says almost the same.

The next roundup on the sekonic is 1/250 and f:8. The light is not really stable but it shouldn't affect the point I'm trying to express.

 

Now I took some shots with the M just to give an idea of the colors: no white, almost no black, then the MM should deliver a perfect grey tone with no burns.

 

So there it is, the M at the selected speed / setting, quick lens change so that I can compare apples to apples, and the Cron APO 50 is on the MM for 3 shots: same setting, and half a stop under, then another half.

 

Direct export from LR into jpgs.

 

I can't say I like the first MM light, it does not correspond to what the M (and my eyes) saw...

I'm much happier with the one stop under picture.

 

When you get some high lights it's even more significative.

 

Hope it's clearer now :confused:

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OK, I see what you´re after (I think...). The thing to remember is that both we and the camera meter have different ideas about what´s important in a scene - and it is our ideas that should win!

 

The meter sees the scene in a center weighted way, so in your example the most important thing for it is the center portal with the 2 people, and this is rather dark. For us, the beautiful, light stone facade of the rest of the building is quite central to the mood of the picture, but the camera doesn´t see it that way. You need to pull the exposure back almost one step in post processing to get it right (and then those 2 people are a bit too dark IMHO, so I´d make some local adjustment to them, and the center of the portal, as well).

 

My experience is that the MM files do need much more PP work than M9 ones, but as long as you haven´t blown any important highlights, the files allow lots of adjustment.

 

Only, you have to know what you want, and how to use your tools to get it. But that has been true since the cave paintings; it´s nothing new in the digital age...

Edited by elgenper
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Thanks Per, I fully agree with you. Nevertheless, I still can't understand why when the M is at 1/125th f:8 my feeling about "equivalent light" is obtained at f:11 on the MM, for the same light and same ISO. Maybe my MM is adding light to the light :D

 

Obviously I can live with it and I just set -2/3 and everything is fine... ;)

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...I just set -2/3 and everything is fine... ;)

 

However as Per mentioned the key is protect the highlights unless the scene and your view of it dictates their overexposure....

 

So when you expose for your correct exposure you may be losing a bit of information that would be found with ETTR. Looking at your examples none show overexposure and the wonderful quality of MM is the ability to work with the file.

 

I would tend to expose as the meter seems to have done in the first picture unless large areas would be overexposed. Your options for post process are greater with the somewhat relatively larger amount of data.

 

You may find that with certain scenes or with time you may reinterpret the file to a lighter balance.

 

Again, no correct answer as the final picture is a rather subjective choice...the one you saw prior to exposing the file.

 

Bob

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Here are a couple of pictures that might suggest my subject tonal preferences....

 

 

 

 

Bob

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Edited by docmoore
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In answer to the question. Oh yes!!...I do always deliberately underexpose with the MM. It pays to do so. As has been previously noted shadow areas are not a problem but highlights certainly can be, as we should all know!

And yes...there are a number of examples of MM images posted on this forum at this very moment where the photographer/s obviously have yet to come to grips with that fact, possibly due in part to a basic lack of printing experience.

I frequently give thanks to the fact that I spent many years in a b&w darkroom learning the hard way just what a print should look like and what one can realistically expect to get from a negative, that sort of experience makes life with the MM so much easier!

 

*If anyone is interested in examples there are lots of deliberately underexposed MM shots on my flickr Photostream...see link below....

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Pretty much constantly have my MM set to underexpose by 2/3, and I also have a light yellow filter always on the lenses.

 

When you are working fast and have no time to deliberately point the meter to an 18% area this helps to safeguard the highlight tonality.

 

Example links in my sig.

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Hi Snooper - I would encourage you not to rely on the meter in the camera. If the sky is anywhere in the frame it will change for each inch you move. As a general matter, I would encourage you to go back to basics and pretend that you have an old meter-less film camera and, if anything, underexpose by a half stop rather than overexpose by the same margin. The problem (and yes, I am characterizing it as a problem) is that the highlights just don't have much latitude at all. You can overexpose them by a stop but after that you'll get blown highlights. The problem with blown highlights is that the zones 8 and 9 tones can't be brought down in PP without creating ugly separation between these zones and the blown highlights. In my shots, I find that this can ruin the charm of the image.

 

Thankfully, the latitude in the shadows is far superior to that of film, or any other 35mm full frame digital camera that I have used. In most cases, this enhanced latitude can get you what you need.

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Here are a couple of pictures that might suggest my subject tonal preferences....

 

 

 

 

Bob

 

Very nice, Bob. But the shot of the flowers on the table has a nasty streak of blown highlights running across the upper right corner of the image. There isn't much tonality separating the blown highlight streak and the adjacent darker mid-tones. It looks to me that this image could have benefitted from a good half of a stop less exposure, perhaps even a full stop. I'm confident that you could have retained the excellent detail in the table and flowers. Just a couple of cents...

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I can't say I like the first MM light, it does not correspond to what the M (and my eyes) saw...

 

Post processing.

 

In terms of exposure you should be looking at getting as much information in the file as possible, so expose to the right of the histogram right up to the point of the highlights blowing. In terms of general exposure for the mid tones this may well mean the image is generally underexposed in a very contrasty scene. And dialling in a slight bit of underexposure is a safety net when you don't have time to accurately meter every picture. When you have as much information as possible in the file your next step is to organise it for brightness and contrast. Which is where making it look like the scene comes into the equation, or you could improve upon the scene, and this is done in post processing.

 

Each of the examples you posted could made to look similar, and importantly each could be processed to re-interpret or heighten what you felt about the scene rather than simply copying what the camera saw.

 

Steve

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I'm sorry but expose to the right is not my devise (with my M9 either) and I really don't get why that would give you the most information. Put the highlights in Zone VI and max VII; this way you'll never loose information. "Expose for the Shadows - Develop for the Highlights" is an analogue devise, more precise for negative film. Digital photography is much more like exposing a slide film.

Edited by otto.f
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I must say however that I can see the OP's point: the tonal value of the big bowl at the left in the M240 corresponds to the third shot with MM, or at least somewhere between the second and third. This feels a bit strange for me indeed and I don't recognize it in my experience with shooting with M9 and MM together on equal scenes

Edited by otto.f
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I must say however that I can see the OP's point: the tonal value of the big bowl at the left in the M240 corresponds to the third shot with MM, or at least somewhere between the second and third. This feels a bit strange for me indeed and I don't recognize it in my experience with shooting with M9 and MM together on equal scenes

Yes, but that is just a minimal movement of the exposure slider in postprocessing.

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