The Art of Photography: Understanding Exposure and Metering

If you're new to photography, it's essential to develop your eye on the subject you want to capture. This means looking at photographers who specialize in the type of photography you want to do, such as night shots or landscape photography. Study their techniques, exposure settings, and metering strategies. Pay attention to how they handle darkness or light, and whether they use HDR (High Dynamic Range) to balance the contrast between bright and dark areas. By observing others' work, you'll gain a better understanding of what it takes to capture great images.

Another crucial step in mastering photography is practice. The only way to develop your skills is by getting out there and shooting. Start with basic exposure settings and experiment with adjusting them to see how they affect the image. You can use exposure bracketing to adjust your exposures up or down two stops, either by going underexpose or overexpose a frame. If you're shooting something stationary and have a tripod set up, you can manually adjust the aperture, shutter speed, and ISO to achieve the desired effect.

The use of a tripod is essential for low-light photography, particularly at night when the camera's ISO tends to skyrocket. By stabilizing your camera on a tripod, you can lower your ISO and reduce noise in your images. This allows you to capture sharper images with more detail, even in extremely dark conditions. The key to using a tripod effectively is to adjust your exposure settings accordingly, taking into account the length of time your shutter is open.

Exposure bracketing is another technique used to capture multiple exposures on a single image. By setting your camera to bracket your exposures, you can create an HDR image with multiple stops of contrast. This technique requires some practice and patience, but it's an effective way to balance the brightness in your images. When shooting film, it's especially important to understand exposure and metering, as it allows you to capture more precise control over your images.

Using a medium format film camera can be beneficial when working with HDR, as it provides a longer process time to get familiar with film speed and exposure. This means that the photographer has more time to adjust their settings and achieve the desired effect. Furthermore, the resulting image will have more detail and depth than an image captured using digital cameras.

While mastering photography takes time and practice, understanding exposure and metering is essential for achieving great results. By observing others' work, practicing with your camera, and adjusting your settings according to the lighting conditions, you'll be well on your way to capturing stunning images that showcase your artistic vision.

Night Photography: A Specialized Art Form

One of the most challenging aspects of photography is capturing images in low-light conditions. Night photography presents a unique set of challenges, from exposure to metering and camera settings. By studying other photographers who specialize in night photography, you can gain insight into their techniques and strategies for achieving great results.

Shooting at night often requires careful consideration of the lighting conditions. This includes factors such as the time of day, weather conditions, and ambient light levels. Understanding how to adjust your exposure settings accordingly is crucial for capturing images that are not overly bright or dark. By using a tripod, you can stabilize your camera and reduce noise in your images, making it easier to achieve the desired effect.

When shooting at night, it's essential to consider the ISO setting on your camera. While most cameras have an automatic mode, this may not always be the best option when capturing low-light images. By adjusting your ISO manually, you can control the amount of noise in your image and achieve a cleaner result.

In addition to using a tripod and adjusting your ISO settings, there are several other techniques that photographers use to capture great night images. These include exposure bracketing, which allows you to capture multiple exposures on a single image, and using special camera modes or features, such as bulb mode or long exposure. By experimenting with different techniques and strategies, you can develop the skills needed to capture stunning night images.

Tips for Shooting at Night

If you're new to night photography, here are some tips to get you started:

* Practice makes perfect: The more you practice shooting in low-light conditions, the better you'll become.

* Use a tripod: Stabilizing your camera is essential for achieving sharp images and reducing noise.

* Adjust your ISO settings manually: By controlling your ISO, you can reduce noise and achieve cleaner results.

* Experiment with different techniques: Try exposure bracketing, bulb mode, or other special features to capture unique images.

Film Photography: A Unique Perspective

If you're interested in film photography, there's a lot to learn about the process and how it differs from digital photography. One of the most significant differences is the way you work with exposure and metering. When shooting film, you need to consider not only the technical aspects of your camera but also the chemical processes involved in developing your images.

Exposure bracketing is particularly useful when working with film, as it allows you to capture multiple exposures that can be combined later to create a single image with greater contrast and detail. This technique requires some practice and patience, but the results are well worth the effort.

When using medium format film cameras, you'll have more time to adjust your settings and achieve the desired effect. The resulting images will have more detail and depth than digital images captured under similar conditions. By mastering film photography, you can develop a unique perspective on photography that sets your work apart from others.

Conclusion

Mastering exposure and metering is essential for achieving great results in photography. By observing other photographers, practicing with your camera, and adjusting your settings according to the lighting conditions, you'll be well on your way to capturing stunning images that showcase your artistic vision. Whether you're shooting in low-light conditions or experimenting with film photography, understanding exposure and metering will help you develop the skills needed to achieve success in this art form.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey everybody my name is Ted Forbes and welcome back again to the Art of Photography today our subject is metering using a light meter and I want to talk about this today in the context of night photography and shooting at night um I had a recent experience where I went out and did some night shooting with a friend of mine and I realized that this is really a good subject we need to talk about on here because there was a lot of adjustments that I found myself having to make and I guess I'm going to refer back to some other podcasts and some earlier episodes that we did on metering and you can see those in the show notes I'll put links however you're watching this um you might want to consult the show notes I'm not to repeat a lot of that information today because I think when we've covered metering in the past we've talked about it from a very technical perspective we've talked about using a light meter using things like Sunny 16 um you know to basically meteor composition and and get the best exposure that you can possibly do um what I want to talk about today is more the creative side of that and adjustments that you'll need to make and you know really it comes down to this the best tool for this is going to be your own mind and your eye and I know that seems kind of maybe a little compl being an obvious way of looking at it because we have covered those technical aspects of it before but really what's going to happen is is if you're using a modern DSLR especially where you're using a a very current camera that has a very Advanced metering system in it for measuring light um a lot of times it it's going to differ from camera to camera so again you're going to need to consult your own manual to know what mode you're using for that um but today we're going to throw that side just a little bit um a lot of times the more advanced metering modes that that cameras have now uh use a type of valuea of metering and so what it does is it puts several places on that scene and it's going to look for the light areas and the dark areas and then essentially what it does is it runs that through a system of algorithms that are stored inside your your camera's computer and it's going to make its best educated guess as to what you're going for and that's what's going to meter a scene so if you have your camera in some kind of automatic mode that's what it's going to do to get its basic exposure there's several methods for that and it picks a different method depending on what you kind of metering you have set up in your camera there's no magic Silver Bullet here um you know there's no night mode you can flip on or anything like that and what you're eventually going to have to do is make up decisions on whether or not that that exposure was exactly what you're going for as a photographer and I'll explain a little further um typically uh what will happen is on a digital camera you can obviously shoot and review the image right afterwards on a film camera it's a little more difficult and you know if you're a film shooter and a lot of the film Shooters I always say what you want to do is really get to know the the type of film that you're using and the environment that you're shooting in um for digital you tend to have the added advantage that you can look at that on the back of the camera now generally it's also kind of a common practice that a lot of photographers will just you know shoot an automatic and then they'll do a lot of post- production um from my experience I don't like to do that I'm not saying I don't do post- production at all I definitely do um but the more that you can get right in the camera the better off you're going to be because it's going to be easier on you it's less time in post-production you're not going to have to push the image further than it really wants to go if you didn't get get a good exposure and so there's things like that to keep in mind and I think that's really important is is is the the most you can I've said that on here a lot the most you can get right um in camera while you're shooting the better off you're going to be in post later um but anyway aside that um you know when you're shooting at night typically and I'm going to show you a couple images that that I took this weekend um what you want to remember is is when you're getting an exposure on your camera there's a certain amount of latitude whether you're shooting film or digital or whatever that the camera will pick up and anything outside that attitude tends to go either bright or dark and what you're going to be looking for and this is what anel Adams always described it as when he was shooting was you're looking for um the the shades of light where you're still going to retain texture and that's a usable part of the image okay so for instance if you have highlights that get too bright and they're outside that c your camera or your film's range they're going to blow out is typically what that's know they just go to pure white or sometimes they have a color Hue to them um Shadows that get too dark lose all their texture and they become blacks so it's really easy to look at your image in those terms shooting at night is very difficult because you have this added element in there where you have a extremely wide dynamic range now the human eye will pick up most of that dynamic range uh a lot more than your camera will or even a piece of film whe and so a lot of times you're trying to interpret what it is you're seeing that's going to be either on the computer screen onto a piece of paper whatever that is in the end and that is the challenge and sometimes when you're shooting night photography you have such an extreme dynamic range like that that if you're really looking to bring up detail and texture and shadows like a night sky that has maybe some dark clouds in it or maybe dark objects that that that you have in the foreground a lot of times you have especially if you're shooting Outdoors a lot of street lights sodium lights Etc lights on buildings these tend to be really bright in comparison to most of what you're trying to shoot so a lot of times you've got to get accustomed to the fact that you're going to have highlights that blow out typically this is not a bad thing um they tend to get a little bigger and they'll blow out but they still Define buildings and shapes and whatnot and it it really all depends on your composition and you can see where I'm going with this that all these factors are going to be things that you're looking for as a photographer and they're not something that a camera or a computer is going to be able to analyze really and bring through and this is an argument this is not an argument of technology versus the human brain but this is how it is and it's really important to evaluate the scene that you're doing and try to figure out what the best exposure for that scene is personally I found on and I was shooting digital the other night and I was using my Canon 5D and I noticed that it really wants to make everything too bright a lot of times so this is one argument for checking your exposure and adjusting accordingly and there's a number of ways you can do this and we'll get into that um the image I'm going to show you right now is we had the night I was shooting there were high winds and I had some really wonderful Cloud motion and I wanted to try to get some clouds to that were coming by that were blurring and so you can see in this first shot that I'm going to put up uh this was shot and I I kind of did this with this episode mind so I just shot something this is just you know I I put the the the camera it was actually in time priority mode because I wanted to get the blur of the cloud moving by but this is not a good exposure it's too bright and the the the camera's meter was trying to evaluate this I you know maybe it was looking as a daylight scene or something like that it was a longer exposure it was leaving the shutter open uh but this is too bright this is really not what things looked like when I was there uh it's not what I wanted to interpret it as and so I found in the second shot that under exposing this two stops was the way to go and there are a number of easy ways you can do this but this actually retains uh the fact that the sky is a night sky and I wanted that to go dark and the cloud is moving across and I can adjust the contract accordingly but I I didn't have anything blowing out necessarily lightwise on the cloud but anyway the second shot is underexposed two stops from what my meter was giving me so the point of all this is if you just go out and shoot throw it into automatic mode and see what you come up with it's not always going to be right and as a photographer I I think you have that power to make that decision of what the exposure needs to be and I think that's really important I'll show you another another image and this also just you know for another reason um no particular reason was also underexposed two stops and I'll show you the difference here and I'm going to show you two shots this was the shot as it came off the camera and it was pretty good enough with the detail there are a lot of ground lights here but I didn't want them to blow out necessarily I mean they they they do a little bit but you know if I had left this at you know just whatever the camera had come up with I told it to under exposed to stops but if it had been a regular exposure um this would have been particularly um know some of the lights would have blown out too much for my taste and so I wanted to tone those down which is kind of the opposite of what you do on film and but I did shoot for the highlights and then I'm developing my shadow areas so in post-processing what I'll do is the second image is just a little bit this is a a very um I'll show you the image this is a very subtle difference but I did go in and and bring in some of my shadow tones um in post- production and I did this you know you can do it with anything Photoshop Lightroom I used Apple's aperture uh it's a very subtle move but I still wanted things to be dark and so anyway so this is another scene where once again the metering was off it wanted to go too bright and just in general I've noticed that particularly on my camera the way at meters is it wants to see things too bright when I'm shooting at night and a lot of that is I'm really throwing the camera curveball with some weird contrasts uh because you are shooting at night there's some extreme darks and some extreme lights and you kind of have to pick your middle ground and shoot for that now you could do HDR and we've covered that uh previously I'll put that episode in the show notes as well and I did a night scene in particular in HDR um but I had enough light in what I was dealing with where it really didn't call for HDR in fact if your clouds are moving it's going to be pretty near impossible to get an HDR shot because you have motion and you need to shoot three images to get or at least to get that HDR shot um if objects in particular your subject is moving out of place it's just not going to work so that that's one thing to consider um so really you know what I would do is is is start developing your eye on this go look at photography that is representative of what you want to do so for instance if you want to get some night shots start looking at photographers who are getting that and and shooting at night and how do their exposures look what is it they're getting um are they kind of leaning towards the dark end of things are they leaning towards the bright end of things is it an HDR kind of thing and that is a good starting point if you're not familiar with the subject enough to what you're going for in terms of metering and you know that takes practice and it takes time and it takes maturity as a photographer and that's not something that you could kind of learn from me just telling you in one video or you know something like that so anyway the best thing to do is do that the second thing is get out there and shoot there's a number of ways you can change the exposure settings on your camera um if you're kind of go down or up two stops either way simply you can use exposure bracketing to do that um you can you can simply tell the camera hey under whatever you're reading underexpose it two stops and it'll do it um probably the best way to do this is you know particular if you're shooting something that's sitting still and you've got a tripod going set up your tripod figure out what your meter reading is and then flip over to manual mode and then you have all the control over the aperture of the shutter speed whichever you need to adjust um that that is possible the other thing about using a tripod and I know it's a little off the topic here but uh it allows you to lower your ISO and when I'm shooting at night particularly because it is low lighting the camera's going to want to do stuff like you know start at at least 1600 ISO or 3200 if you're shooting people you're going to need that speed because you're going to try to reduce the amount of motion that you have particular of your hand shooting if you're shooting landscape stuff like what I've done here um use a tripod and then you know you can use whatever ISO setting you want if you have a 30 second exposure that's fine uh depending on what motion you have in there you can adjust that accordingly and that's really important to be able to do uh is get that ISO down because what it's going to do is is reduce the noise considerably and most modern digital cameras can handle noise you know at 200 400 800 just fine uh it's when you get above that you start getting the noise Factor creeping in and you know the most important thing is getting the right and getting the exposure right that um rather than picking at noise or pixels or ISO I think that's the the most important thing but these are some added benefits of uh of shooting this way um so anyway uh some night stuff leave comments questions uh we can talk some more about this if you guys have anything you want me to cover on it um in particular but uh I really do like shooting at night uh one thing I want to add is if you do shoot film and you don't have that ability to review what you want to do is be bracketing your exposures and it's really easy to do basically you're going to get a Light reading and sometimes it's really hard to get a light meter reading at night if you don't have a through the lens kind of deal going uh but if you're shooting a medium format film camera something like that um you know it's a longer process to get this down but it's like the more you can go out and shoot uh get used to the same film speed um and getting understanding exposure and bracket it when if you think you have a an exposure that's determined uh go to the next frame overexpose it and go to the next frame and underexpose it and it's kind of the same Principle as getting um an image for HDR production even though we're using film but what you're going to do is you're going to have several exposures to shoot from and I think it's even more important because when you're especially if you're doing dark room work with film uh it's not like going into aperture Lightroom where you flip a couple switches and work with it until it kind of comes together it's a lot more tedious and so that's another reason to get it as right as you can you know while you're shooting in camera so anyway like I said leave a comment uh ask me questions anything like that I'd be happy to address more on this topic once again folks this has been the Art of Photography thank you for watchinghey everybody my name is Ted Forbes and welcome back again to the Art of Photography today our subject is metering using a light meter and I want to talk about this today in the context of night photography and shooting at night um I had a recent experience where I went out and did some night shooting with a friend of mine and I realized that this is really a good subject we need to talk about on here because there was a lot of adjustments that I found myself having to make and I guess I'm going to refer back to some other podcasts and some earlier episodes that we did on metering and you can see those in the show notes I'll put links however you're watching this um you might want to consult the show notes I'm not to repeat a lot of that information today because I think when we've covered metering in the past we've talked about it from a very technical perspective we've talked about using a light meter using things like Sunny 16 um you know to basically meteor composition and and get the best exposure that you can possibly do um what I want to talk about today is more the creative side of that and adjustments that you'll need to make and you know really it comes down to this the best tool for this is going to be your own mind and your eye and I know that seems kind of maybe a little compl being an obvious way of looking at it because we have covered those technical aspects of it before but really what's going to happen is is if you're using a modern DSLR especially where you're using a a very current camera that has a very Advanced metering system in it for measuring light um a lot of times it it's going to differ from camera to camera so again you're going to need to consult your own manual to know what mode you're using for that um but today we're going to throw that side just a little bit um a lot of times the more advanced metering modes that that cameras have now uh use a type of valuea of metering and so what it does is it puts several places on that scene and it's going to look for the light areas and the dark areas and then essentially what it does is it runs that through a system of algorithms that are stored inside your your camera's computer and it's going to make its best educated guess as to what you're going for and that's what's going to meter a scene so if you have your camera in some kind of automatic mode that's what it's going to do to get its basic exposure there's several methods for that and it picks a different method depending on what you kind of metering you have set up in your camera there's no magic Silver Bullet here um you know there's no night mode you can flip on or anything like that and what you're eventually going to have to do is make up decisions on whether or not that that exposure was exactly what you're going for as a photographer and I'll explain a little further um typically uh what will happen is on a digital camera you can obviously shoot and review the image right afterwards on a film camera it's a little more difficult and you know if you're a film shooter and a lot of the film Shooters I always say what you want to do is really get to know the the type of film that you're using and the environment that you're shooting in um for digital you tend to have the added advantage that you can look at that on the back of the camera now generally it's also kind of a common practice that a lot of photographers will just you know shoot an automatic and then they'll do a lot of post- production um from my experience I don't like to do that I'm not saying I don't do post- production at all I definitely do um but the more that you can get right in the camera the better off you're going to be because it's going to be easier on you it's less time in post-production you're not going to have to push the image further than it really wants to go if you didn't get get a good exposure and so there's things like that to keep in mind and I think that's really important is is is the the most you can I've said that on here a lot the most you can get right um in camera while you're shooting the better off you're going to be in post later um but anyway aside that um you know when you're shooting at night typically and I'm going to show you a couple images that that I took this weekend um what you want to remember is is when you're getting an exposure on your camera there's a certain amount of latitude whether you're shooting film or digital or whatever that the camera will pick up and anything outside that attitude tends to go either bright or dark and what you're going to be looking for and this is what anel Adams always described it as when he was shooting was you're looking for um the the shades of light where you're still going to retain texture and that's a usable part of the image okay so for instance if you have highlights that get too bright and they're outside that c your camera or your film's range they're going to blow out is typically what that's know they just go to pure white or sometimes they have a color Hue to them um Shadows that get too dark lose all their texture and they become blacks so it's really easy to look at your image in those terms shooting at night is very difficult because you have this added element in there where you have a extremely wide dynamic range now the human eye will pick up most of that dynamic range uh a lot more than your camera will or even a piece of film whe and so a lot of times you're trying to interpret what it is you're seeing that's going to be either on the computer screen onto a piece of paper whatever that is in the end and that is the challenge and sometimes when you're shooting night photography you have such an extreme dynamic range like that that if you're really looking to bring up detail and texture and shadows like a night sky that has maybe some dark clouds in it or maybe dark objects that that that you have in the foreground a lot of times you have especially if you're shooting Outdoors a lot of street lights sodium lights Etc lights on buildings these tend to be really bright in comparison to most of what you're trying to shoot so a lot of times you've got to get accustomed to the fact that you're going to have highlights that blow out typically this is not a bad thing um they tend to get a little bigger and they'll blow out but they still Define buildings and shapes and whatnot and it it really all depends on your composition and you can see where I'm going with this that all these factors are going to be things that you're looking for as a photographer and they're not something that a camera or a computer is going to be able to analyze really and bring through and this is an argument this is not an argument of technology versus the human brain but this is how it is and it's really important to evaluate the scene that you're doing and try to figure out what the best exposure for that scene is personally I found on and I was shooting digital the other night and I was using my Canon 5D and I noticed that it really wants to make everything too bright a lot of times so this is one argument for checking your exposure and adjusting accordingly and there's a number of ways you can do this and we'll get into that um the image I'm going to show you right now is we had the night I was shooting there were high winds and I had some really wonderful Cloud motion and I wanted to try to get some clouds to that were coming by that were blurring and so you can see in this first shot that I'm going to put up uh this was shot and I I kind of did this with this episode mind so I just shot something this is just you know I I put the the the camera it was actually in time priority mode because I wanted to get the blur of the cloud moving by but this is not a good exposure it's too bright and the the the camera's meter was trying to evaluate this I you know maybe it was looking as a daylight scene or something like that it was a longer exposure it was leaving the shutter open uh but this is too bright this is really not what things looked like when I was there uh it's not what I wanted to interpret it as and so I found in the second shot that under exposing this two stops was the way to go and there are a number of easy ways you can do this but this actually retains uh the fact that the sky is a night sky and I wanted that to go dark and the cloud is moving across and I can adjust the contract accordingly but I I didn't have anything blowing out necessarily lightwise on the cloud but anyway the second shot is underexposed two stops from what my meter was giving me so the point of all this is if you just go out and shoot throw it into automatic mode and see what you come up with it's not always going to be right and as a photographer I I think you have that power to make that decision of what the exposure needs to be and I think that's really important I'll show you another another image and this also just you know for another reason um no particular reason was also underexposed two stops and I'll show you the difference here and I'm going to show you two shots this was the shot as it came off the camera and it was pretty good enough with the detail there are a lot of ground lights here but I didn't want them to blow out necessarily I mean they they they do a little bit but you know if I had left this at you know just whatever the camera had come up with I told it to under exposed to stops but if it had been a regular exposure um this would have been particularly um know some of the lights would have blown out too much for my taste and so I wanted to tone those down which is kind of the opposite of what you do on film and but I did shoot for the highlights and then I'm developing my shadow areas so in post-processing what I'll do is the second image is just a little bit this is a a very um I'll show you the image this is a very subtle difference but I did go in and and bring in some of my shadow tones um in post- production and I did this you know you can do it with anything Photoshop Lightroom I used Apple's aperture uh it's a very subtle move but I still wanted things to be dark and so anyway so this is another scene where once again the metering was off it wanted to go too bright and just in general I've noticed that particularly on my camera the way at meters is it wants to see things too bright when I'm shooting at night and a lot of that is I'm really throwing the camera curveball with some weird contrasts uh because you are shooting at night there's some extreme darks and some extreme lights and you kind of have to pick your middle ground and shoot for that now you could do HDR and we've covered that uh previously I'll put that episode in the show notes as well and I did a night scene in particular in HDR um but I had enough light in what I was dealing with where it really didn't call for HDR in fact if your clouds are moving it's going to be pretty near impossible to get an HDR shot because you have motion and you need to shoot three images to get or at least to get that HDR shot um if objects in particular your subject is moving out of place it's just not going to work so that that's one thing to consider um so really you know what I would do is is is start developing your eye on this go look at photography that is representative of what you want to do so for instance if you want to get some night shots start looking at photographers who are getting that and and shooting at night and how do their exposures look what is it they're getting um are they kind of leaning towards the dark end of things are they leaning towards the bright end of things is it an HDR kind of thing and that is a good starting point if you're not familiar with the subject enough to what you're going for in terms of metering and you know that takes practice and it takes time and it takes maturity as a photographer and that's not something that you could kind of learn from me just telling you in one video or you know something like that so anyway the best thing to do is do that the second thing is get out there and shoot there's a number of ways you can change the exposure settings on your camera um if you're kind of go down or up two stops either way simply you can use exposure bracketing to do that um you can you can simply tell the camera hey under whatever you're reading underexpose it two stops and it'll do it um probably the best way to do this is you know particular if you're shooting something that's sitting still and you've got a tripod going set up your tripod figure out what your meter reading is and then flip over to manual mode and then you have all the control over the aperture of the shutter speed whichever you need to adjust um that that is possible the other thing about using a tripod and I know it's a little off the topic here but uh it allows you to lower your ISO and when I'm shooting at night particularly because it is low lighting the camera's going to want to do stuff like you know start at at least 1600 ISO or 3200 if you're shooting people you're going to need that speed because you're going to try to reduce the amount of motion that you have particular of your hand shooting if you're shooting landscape stuff like what I've done here um use a tripod and then you know you can use whatever ISO setting you want if you have a 30 second exposure that's fine uh depending on what motion you have in there you can adjust that accordingly and that's really important to be able to do uh is get that ISO down because what it's going to do is is reduce the noise considerably and most modern digital cameras can handle noise you know at 200 400 800 just fine uh it's when you get above that you start getting the noise Factor creeping in and you know the most important thing is getting the right and getting the exposure right that um rather than picking at noise or pixels or ISO I think that's the the most important thing but these are some added benefits of uh of shooting this way um so anyway uh some night stuff leave comments questions uh we can talk some more about this if you guys have anything you want me to cover on it um in particular but uh I really do like shooting at night uh one thing I want to add is if you do shoot film and you don't have that ability to review what you want to do is be bracketing your exposures and it's really easy to do basically you're going to get a Light reading and sometimes it's really hard to get a light meter reading at night if you don't have a through the lens kind of deal going uh but if you're shooting a medium format film camera something like that um you know it's a longer process to get this down but it's like the more you can go out and shoot uh get used to the same film speed um and getting understanding exposure and bracket it when if you think you have a an exposure that's determined uh go to the next frame overexpose it and go to the next frame and underexpose it and it's kind of the same Principle as getting um an image for HDR production even though we're using film but what you're going to do is you're going to have several exposures to shoot from and I think it's even more important because when you're especially if you're doing dark room work with film uh it's not like going into aperture Lightroom where you flip a couple switches and work with it until it kind of comes together it's a lot more tedious and so that's another reason to get it as right as you can you know while you're shooting in camera so anyway like I said leave a comment uh ask me questions anything like that I'd be happy to address more on this topic once again folks this has been the Art of Photography thank you for watching\n"