Digital BW, The Print

From his book "Examples, The Making of 40 Photographs" where he talks
about making this photograph, he says "I was at a loss with the subject
luminance values, and I confess I was thinking of bracketing several
exposures..."

You've left out everything in "Examples" that follows the word "exposures," 
which is his description of the elaborate procedure he went through to 
arrive at the exposure and which I summarized in my previous message.  But 
relax, I stuck a smiley face at the end of my description, I don't think 
there's much point in arguing over the meaning of the word "guess." Why 
don't we call it an educated guess and let it go at that?

----- Original Message ----- 
From: <hogarth@...>
To: <DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Saturday, June 03, 2006 12:02 PM
Subject: Re: [Digital BW] Re: Moonrise - was Signing prints question


I didn't say he wasn't prepared. And Ansel said in his own accounts that
he couldn't find a meter quickly enough, so he made a guess based on his
experience:

 From his book "Examples, The Making of 40 Photographs" where he talks
about making this photograph, he says "I was at a loss with the subject
luminance values, and I confess I was thinking of bracketing several
exposures..." and "The white crosses were on the edge of sunlight and
reasonably "safe"; the shaded foreground was of very low value. Had I
known how low it was I would have given at least 50 percent more
exposure..."

He guessed. And made a pretty darn good guess, due to his huge amount of
experience.

Hey look - I'm a big Ansel fan. Don't think I'm putting him down;
nothing could be farther from the truth. But Ansel said that this image
wasn't made using the deliberate approach he himself advocated and
taught. This to my mind makes it a poor image with which to judge the
Zone System. And that's the point I was trying to make.
--
Bruce Watson


Brian Ellis wrote:

> "He couldn't find a light meter, so he guessed. "
>
> Well if you consider knowing the luminance of the moon in candle feet off
> the top of your head,  also knowing off the top of your head that you can
> take the square root of the film speed and convert it to an exposure by
> using the reciprocal of the luminance expressed in candle feet, doing
> that
> calculation in your head and applying that knowledge to determine that
> the
> luminance of the moon fell on Zone VII, then from that calculating the
> Zone
> V luminance and the resulting exposure, and finally applying  a 3x filter
> factor to that calculated exposure to arrive at a final exposure of 1
> second
> at f32, all while frantically setting up an 8x10 camera to make a
> photograph
> while the light was disappearing, to be "guessing," I guess you could
> say he
> guessed. : - )

















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