Stan writes: > I take a lot of photos in mountains and > deserts, metering with a handheld 1 degree > spotmeter and I don't recall ever seeing > more than 6-7 stops ...
This correlates well with my experience. I can see a ten-stop spread in two different scenes, e.g., the difference between exposure for a sunlit building at noon and the interior of a dark cathedral (f/16 at 1/100 for the former, and f/2 at 1/8 for the latter, or about 10 stops), but I can't remember seeing this in a single scene, short of pointing the meter at a direct light source or something. Ansel Adams would have never been able to do what he did if scenes regularly spanned more than ten stops, since even B&W film would have great difficulty holding any useful detail over that range. And his own system used considerably fewer stops for the purposes of calculation. Additionally, as I've said, slide film would be largely useless for photography if scenes regularly spanned ten stops, with the an exposure range for slide film that is some 30 times smaller. Practically all dark areas would be blocked, and all bright areas blown out. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe by mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED], with 'unsubscribe filmscanners' or 'unsubscribe filmscanners_digest' (as appropriate) in the message title or body
