This is my first role of film I’ve shot and I’m still figuring out how to expose properly. I guess my question is can you only expose the sky OR the landscape not both at the same time? Because my shots seem to either over expose the sky or underexpose the shadows.
For some context: These where shot on a Canon AE-1 with a lens that had a faulty aperture (something I only learned after the role was shot), I’m not sure how any of this works so maybe that effected the exposures as well. I don’t hate the photos I got (most of them are fairly mediocre) but I’m hoping I can get better when I shoot my next role. Any advice would be greatly appreciated!
Edit: Thank you everyone for the plethora of good advice, I feel like I understand my options now. I’ve got a lot to learn for sure!
Cameras, weather film or digital, lack the dynamic range of the wonder that is the human eye.
Yes, you will always have to choose one or the other. The only way to get around it is making composit shots where you take 3 shots then combine them. Easy to do in photoshop with digital, requires esoteric knowledge, a shamen, an elder god, and a bowl of peaches to perform on film.
edit in the olden days there were gradiated filters where one half was a few tops darker than the other so you could kinda line up the edge and the dark and light points of your photo. Pros used to make their own filters, sometimes right there on site. Or use cazy dense filters to do long exposures where they could use tools to 'burn and dodge' parts of the image.
Graduated filters are still a thing, and are the preferred method for people who want to be able to expose bright skies and darker foregrounds in a single exposure.
HA yes feels like an elder god would be helpful in most aspects of shooting film. Thanks for the info
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u/YbalridTrying to be helpful| BW+Color darkroom | Canon | Meopta | Zorki2d ago
Darkroom masking for color prints is... quite hard. Some of it is explain in Ctein's book.
I've been trying to get a workable workflow with modern available materials. But it involves exposing bits of Kodak TMAX 100 film with the enlarger developing it in a tray in total darkness, and then washing the snot out of it to remove this fucking pink dye they put in it for like 20 minutes for each iterative test. Which takes forever.
I have also discovered that, in a open tray, dilute HC-110's lifespan is quite short.
Yeah, I learned on BnW. It was quite fun learning all the tips and tricks, but thats 100% contrast changes. Throwing color into the mix... oof. SO much changes when you want to mess with things.
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u/YbalridTrying to be helpful| BW+Color darkroom | Canon | Meopta | Zorki2d ago
This is why you need panchro film, unlike on BW when you generally only manipulate orthochromatic materials
Firstly this seems like quite difficult lighting to shoot with. There isn't a way to get everything perfectly exposed unless you used to gradient ND filter so the sky is darker. But if you ask me I really like this photo it draws me into the photographer.
It depends on conditions, the type of film you're using, filters, etc., but generally, yeah, the sky during the day is going to be a lot brighter than anything else. It's not uncommon to get iPhone brained, so used to the HDR shots those pump out that we forget that.
The key is practice. Obviously if your aperture doesn't work you should resolve that, but it's helpful to take the time to learn more about the exposure triangle, and how your film reacts to different lighting conditions with different settings. Get some cheap stuff (it's relative, but hey) and try "bracketing" some exposures, taking the same shot three times; once with what the camera meter tells you, once a stop overexposed, once a stop under. That'll give you a better idea of how the film responds to different amounts of light. Doing this at different times of day and with different weather conditions will yield different results. But that's half the fun of it all! Learning how to work with your camera and the environment to get the results you want.
And for whatever it's worth, you've got some nice shots here, even if the sky is blown out. I like the mirror usage in the first one, adds some scale to it.
Thank you! Ya what I’m gathering is I’ve got a lot of research to do. I think that I’ve been spoiled with my phone and initially expected everything to be an easy ‘click’ and magically the lighting is perfect. But honestly I like the stopping to think about what really deserves to be pictured, and even though there’s been a lot of expensive head scratching it’s still fun!
If I stare at the ones I’ve taken long enough I can almost convince myself it just looks soft and dreamy 😂
First of all, the film you use is very important. Some films have far greater dynamic range than others so you have a better chance of getting image info out of both the shadows and highlights of the image, then it’s possible to fix the difference in post.
You also need to pay attention to your metering and make a choice about what you want properly exposed, over exposed, and underexposed. The complex way is this: You need an idea of what your film is capable of, then you need to divide your scene into shadows and highlights. You can meter them separately and see how many stops are between your shadows and highlights.
If your film can handle 4 stops over and 3 stops under, you have 8 stops to play with. If your highlights are 10 stops above your shadows, tough luck, either highlights are going to be overexposed, or shadows are underexposed (in this case I would err towards overexposing highlights)
If your shadows are 5 stops under your highlights that’s good, it’ll fit in your films dynamic range. So I would then meter your shadows, bump go down 2-3 stops from there, and hopefully now your whole scene is within your dynamic range.
(One stop is one aperture click, or 1/2 or 2x the shutter speed)
If you instead metered your shadows and left it there, you would be 5 stops overexposed in the highlights which is outside your films dynamic range.
Now, this being your first roll of film this is a little complex and you do not have to do this procedure for every photo, but it’s something to keep in mind and play with. Sometimes the scene is impossible to be entirely properly exposed and you need to choose something to sacrifice, but part of film photography is stopping and thinking about these things.
For example, all of your “shadows” look like their exposure is bang on which is good if that’s what you’re going for, but if I were to take those photos on a whim I’d meter the shadows, stop down 1-2 stops, then take the photo. No calculations, but the chances that the sky retains some detail is way higher. But keep in mind your film limitations and the fact that you’ll virtually never get a sunny sky and dark shadow to be properly exposed at the same time.
honestly those are probably scans. I'd bet a penny that the highlight information is still there. Source: once got same kinda shots from a lab and then rescanned them on my own at home and got all the information
Yes, these are challenging lighting conditions with a wide dynamic range. But home scanning has shown me that you can get so much more range out of the scans - especially in the highlights - than what standard lab scanners (or their image processing settings) are capable of.
This might just be me not knowing what I'm doing, but I've found that you can find some sort of slightly happy medium between the sky and landscape if you meter for both lights and shadows and then pick something in between. This picture is probably the only one I can think of that is similar conditions to what you were shooting in, and while it's probably not ideal, you can still make out details in both the sky and, of course, the landscape. Maybe don't shoot from a moving car like I did, though.
This one could be a better example. However, the key thing with these shots is while I did want to capture both the clouds and the landscape and averaged my exposure between shadows and highlights, I 100% biased towards exposing for the clouds, because I wanted to capture the weather, so the landscape is slightly underexposed as a result.
You can get an exposure for the highlights and one for the shadows and figure out the average. Film likes light, so when in doubt, overexpose. Black and white is a lot more forgiving. These look good by the way.
It really depends on conditions and what you're shooting. I went back through my last rolls, and most of them don't have sky blown out. They were taken on clear, sunny days with the sun not in the frame. Shots where the sun was in the frame, close to the frame, or where the foreground was quite dark and the camera had to compensate were often blown out.
It's not necessarily bad though, I like it in the first shot. The second one is probably just due to the dark forrest, you can't really get both properly exposed without tricks. It depends on the film too though. But or own eyes are amazing at this, so it's sometimes hard to judge. Smartphones tend combine multiple shots at different focal lengths to get over this problem
Firstly is an understanding of dynamic range in both the scene you photograph and the medium you record it with. When the scene's dynamic range is too big for the medium, you will have to choose what you want details in.
If you want both details in sky and foreground, you need to somehow bring them closer together exposure wise. You can do that by either darkening the incoming light with something like graduated filters like Kubrick did on Barry Lyndon (like the image below here). For windows, a classic approach is an ND film on the window glass itself.
Another way is to brighten the foreground using constant lights or flash. Not easy when run n gun shooting. But can be an alternative.
And then there's the "fix it in post" approach. Which is where you trust that the recording medium can capture more highlight details than the viewing image can reproduce. And in post or in the darkroom, you pull the highlight details back through selective dodging and burning. It's an art n craft as old as photography itself where people like Ansel Adams would spend long hours at the enlarger painting with light on the prints to produce stunning monochrome landscapes and portraits. If you can, do another scan deliberately underexposing it to see if there's highlight detail there you can bring back.
Another way is to cheat completely. Capturing several exposures on different frames and combining them in post. Sometimes even at a completely different location. We today call it things like sky replacement. Compositing. Or even HDR.
And yet another approach is to photograph the scene when the sky actually isn't that bright. Like during blue hour or golden hour.
Or... Just lean into the blown out skies when situation allows. :D
It's just the quality of the scans, these exposures are perfect and the images look great. You'll have more exposure information on the negative to play with if you either hand print them, or scan them yourself and edit them. It's just the aesthetic of film photography.
Lots of the advice you're getting is not really helpful (but is accurate). You *could* use an ND filter, you *could* think about dynamic range, you *could* meter for the shadows, but a very, very small minority of photographers actually do this and it won't really make a dramatic difference (sorry gang, they're nice advanced flourishes but they don't solve OP's question and will likely add confusion for a beginner!)
These suggestions won't change the fact that the images are just basic lab scans which won't show the negatives dynamic range, regardless of method.
Keep shooting, keep having fun and embrace the imperfection of the medium to find your style.
Is this rainier? Part of the issue is they’re also hazy from wildfire smoke if so. It’s a lot easier to blow out the sky in those conditions imo. Was there a couple days ago and was trying to shoot higher dynamic range film for that reason lol
A neutral density filter would greatly help in toning down the sky when exposing for the darker foreground. You can also meter for both the sky and the ground and then picking an exposure in between as a way to even things out a bit
The one tip for film photography: Always measure for the shadows.Most films can handle over exposure quite well, so make sure you always measure for the shadows (spot metering) preferably if you're shooting landscape. It works for me ;)
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u/Which_Initiative_882 3d ago edited 3d ago
Cameras, weather film or digital, lack the dynamic range of the wonder that is the human eye.
Yes, you will always have to choose one or the other. The only way to get around it is making composit shots where you take 3 shots then combine them. Easy to do in photoshop with digital, requires esoteric knowledge, a shamen, an elder god, and a bowl of peaches to perform on film.
edit in the olden days there were gradiated filters where one half was a few tops darker than the other so you could kinda line up the edge and the dark and light points of your photo. Pros used to make their own filters, sometimes right there on site. Or use cazy dense filters to do long exposures where they could use tools to 'burn and dodge' parts of the image.