At 12:31 PM 5/11/2002 -0400, Austin wrote:
>I don't know what you are metering, and whether you are talking landscape
>scenes, or what, but certainly in mountains, where you will get trees and
>rocks, etc. shading items, you will easily get 10+++ stops of range with a
>bright sun shining through. In the desert, well, less likely, of course.
>John Sexton routinely gets 14 stops on his images.
Austin,
Having lived in New England for 10 years, I am surprised that the
brightness range is that large there. Except in fall, it seemed to be
overcast most of the time. Either that or just gray with humidity. :-)
It being a beautiful sunny day without a cloud in the pure blue sky here in
Utah, I decided to see what the range was around my house. Measuring with a
1-degree spot meter, I found the darkest shadows read 9 to 9.5 EV
(actually, I could get down to almost 8 if I aimed the meter into my open
back door), while the brightest reading (my white concrete driveway) was
16.5 EV. The sun reflecting off the snow on Mt. Timpanogos was actually
less than that. It seems like it would be difficult to get shadows any
darker on a clear day because of skylight. (Refer to Figure 4-25 in "The
Negative" by Ansel Adams. Even though it's a shot of sunlit snow and deep
forest shadows, it covers only 5 zones because of reflection from the snow
into the shadow.) And of course if it's overcast so the shadows are darker,
then the highlights will be darker also.
I would expect that desert and mountains would have similar brightness
ranges. Both have very bright highlights with deep shadows.
I guess I have to stand by my assertion that, in my experience anyway,
ranges of 10 stops or greater must almost never occur in actual scenes. I
suppose if a scene contained the setting sun you could get greater than a
10 stop range, but other than that it must be very unusual.
Do you have a reference for the statement about John Sexton's experience?
I'd like to take a look at it.
OB SCANNING: Assuming the film can capture the scene, how do you scan such
extended range scenes? Does your scanner cover such a large range without
compression?
Stan
===========================
Photography by Stan McQueen
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