Bonk, Bonk, Bonk. Is This Thing Turned On?

How many items do you carry in your photographic kit that don't need electricity? Not many, I suspect. Even the lens cleaning cloths these days seem to have a battery door somewhere...

One that you can rely upon without power is the grey card. Also known as the gray card in rural Missississippi. It is the photographic studio equivalent of a Powdermilk Biscuit - always there in the cupboard and good for any number of things.

The schools all teach about grey/gray* cards when they talk photography. In some cases I suspect their lecture material was last revised about the time that Ansel Adams invented the 2-zone system...he expanded his practise later...and they make great theatre out of using the things to assess exposure. Some modern students can be brought to understand this and come cannot, but it is still good to see old rituals being enacted.

The standard 18% reflectance grey/gray card was used first with hand-held meters - indeed it may have been seen with extinction meters in the Jurassic period. It allowed the user to have a standard surface colour and contrast to measure to ensure that exposure fell somewhere in the middle of the sensitive range of the plates or films in use at the time. It worked, and let the user make one good guess regardless of whether the scene to be photographed was in contrasty sunlight or flat dark shade. The photographer could then override that advice by merely setting the aperture or shutter speed differently.

This was in the days before camera companies packed the central processing chip with 20,000 images that could be referenced in an instant to give a perfect exposure. You got one bite at the cherry and, often as not, your teeth hit the stone inside. This was in days when you paid for the film, developing, and printing, and did it with your own money. You wanted to get the exposure right the first time.

Your scene might have been all over the place as far as lights and darks went and measuring any small portion could have thrown out the whole shebang. The 18% reflectance was what your meter was set for so it was what you measured. Some of us measured them at home before we went out and cello-taped the controls down on the cameras but that didn't work all that well...

Well... you can do the same thing now with the cards. Use them as exposure guides or use them as white balance guides. You can shoot a custom WB into one and save yourself a lifetime of slider hockey on the computer when you get home. You can take a clear picture of it, compare it to the computer screen and later to the print and see exactly whether you've got the balance right. Like the multicoloured X-Rite calibration colour checker cards, 30 seconds spent shooting this simple little plastic panel will save you 30 minutes in the computer room.

That's good value for money and time. Grey, gray, or grau - they make sense.

* Not to be confused with a noted Melbourne television personality who did crow imitations.

" How Many Batteries Do I Need? "

How many pockets have you got?

The question of batteries rarely concerned us in the old film days - at least for the little people. The mechanical shutter and the finger-powered film advance worked pretty well all the time and no electricity was needed. Adding a selenium light meter to the mixture still avoided a battery, but as soon as the CdS and later cells were incorporated and we got electronic shutters and motor drives we started to have to be cagey about on-board electricity.

We started to have to look for 22.5 volt batteries for flash guns...similar ones for Polaroid cameras...D cells for Graflex flash guns...and then a whole raft of cells for the early strobe systems. Victor Hasselblad introduced us to a small blue-coated stack of nickel cadmium cells for one of his cameras and they were NEVER happy batteries.

Well, things are now digital, and batteries are a fact of life. We get lithium-ion cells with every camera we buy and if we are wise we grab an extra one from the accessories rack to go with the new kit. Of course they are re-chargeable items - that is part of the appeal of digital photography - but the amount of juice that any given camera takes is variable factor and sometimes you need more than one battery to have reasonable working time.

A case in point is my own dear little Fujifilm X-10. It works well, but the small battery fitting in it poops out at about 200 shots. If I am going for a full day's shooting at the car show I need to take 3 batteries. If I were a car show shooter with a big Nikon D3, D4, or D5 DSLR I could expect about 2000 shots on one battery and would not need a spare for the day*.

Here is where the user of the big pro DSLR has it over the user of the mirror-less camera in most instances - the battery on the bottom grip of this kind is larger and goes longer - or it repeats the battery in the camera and thus doubles the life. But the whole assembly is heavier, so there we go again with the pros and cons.

That's the new Pentax K-1 in the pictures with the accessory battery grip on the bottom. Well-proportioned for a larger hand and all the controls you could decently want scattered on the top and back. A rumour on another site says a new grip for another camera may well have two batteries plus the one in the camera - 3 altogether - makes lots of electricity but adds extra weight. We'll wait and see if the rumour site is right.

* but I'd take a spare for the day because I am the nervous type.

Dr. Strangemeter - Or How I learned To Love The Diffusion Disc

Thanks to a conversation overheard this morning, I have a blog topic.

Light meters.

If you are carrying a digital camera, you are carrying a light meter. Depending upon the make and model of camera, it might share the knowledge it has of the world with you or not - but it most certainly will impose its will upon your images - generally for the better.

Set your camera to Auto, Aperture Priority, Shutter Speed Priority, or Program, and you will be helped by the meter. Set the camera to Manual and you are on your own, though the meter may try to prompt you to make a sensible decision in some way. Some have little bar graphs - some have little warning lights that flash. The Flapoflex D has a plastic bar that comes out and pokes you in the eye if you are more than 5 stops out...

If you've got an older film camera - or a camera that is meant to be used by people who know what they are doing - it probably won't have a meter. You are expected to buy a separate meter and take exposure measurements yourself - or not, if you prefer to be an iconic art treasure of the 21st century.

Let's start off right now by saying that the meter built into your DSLR, mirror-less, or compact camera is smarter than your brother-in-law. Those of you who point out that a jug of milk is smarter than the brother-in-law have my sympathy. The meter may be capable of seeing multiple things about the scene in front of it - looking at dark and light with a clinical precision. It has the benefit of programming that has seen many such scenes before and can work out the best compromise for the shot. This works under a wide range of illumination. It is still possible to present the meter with a scene that is too dark, too bright, too contrasty, too flat, or too weirdly-lit and if you continue to press the shutter button after the " Danger Will Robinson! " announcement the meter will just let you go ahead anyway.

The meters will work effectively with their sister circuits built into dedicated flash guns - they will decide between themselves how much of the exposure can be safely taken from the ambient light and how much must be paid for in electricity. The wise photographer might ask them to bias the thing one way or the other, but after asking should let them get on with it and be grateful for the help. Anything is better than those little aluminium dials that sat on the back of older flash guns.

Do you need a separate meter anyway? Well, apart from the film people with big cameras, the other use of the hand-held meter is to pre-determine the range of exposure you might want, to look at the evenness of illumination on a flat art work, or to minutely analyse a scene in case there are any anomalies in it.

What you do with the anomalies after you find them is your affair, but I tend to expose for the highlights, shadows, and mid-tones and then skew the D-max to the over-temperature zone VII before dropping the gradient mask into the toe of the K-curve. You'll see the effect in the image of the Mississippi traffic patrolman at the top of the page.

Uncle Dick

Travel Light with Gossen and Sekonic

You might think it superfluous these days to carry a hand-held light meter - what with all digital cameras containing their own light metering capability and never being wrong and always giving you perfect exposure every time. Oh, look, there's another flying unicorn...


Where was I? Ah, yes - the Gossen meter and the Sekonic meters. Got 'em both in stock and it looks like some people still use them...to check flash exposures before they light the fuses...to get the exposure right before the model stalks in and glares at them...to get accurate exposure even when the matrix-all-over -whatever-you-want-Boss meter in the camera insists on something that looks horrible.

They buy the small light models and take them in their shirt pockets when they go bush with the panoramic or large format cameras. They pop them out at weddings before the bride arrives to see if the church is dim enough...and there are churches here in Perth that do dim on an industrial basis. You can generally tell from their contact sheets or presentation sites that the exposures are dead on...without having to be shot 15 different times with an air of increasing desperation.

Of course, if you want to sit up until 2:00 AM recovering your exposure on the computer, please do. I'm going to use an exposure meter.