When I don't get my expsures right on slide film I feel like a miserable failure. When it's on, things are grand. The bracketing thing is sensitive, and even 1/3 of a stop can be a lot. For my polarizer I compensate 2 1/2 stops. The really tricky part can be reciprocity. That's a whole other story, and I tend to over sompensate.
Kodak apparently has a color slide film that has no reciprocity up to 10 seconds...or am I hearing things?
Even if everthing I have said is useless, I would recommend very strongly getting a very good light meter. Learn how to use it and read it properly. Using it on incidental is best or perhaps with a grey card to spot meter (or something that will give you a reliable reading) will make life a lot easier.
I'd like to get a quick load holder myself. That seems to be a good move on your part.
a nice little remedy for making sure you never pull the dark slide to early, is to test-fire the shutter once before you pull the slide (or before you place the holder in). If the shutter fires, you know the blades are closed and light tight. If it doesn't fire (on modern shutters anyway?) the shutter blades aren't closed yet.
I started doing this from the get go, mainly because I wanted to make sure the shutter worked before I fired a shot, as one of my lenses was older and beatup looking. As a side benefit, I've never pulled the dark slide early.
Yup a good incident light meter. Or get an incident/spot meter and then figure out the zone system. Siekonic makes cool ones. The hardest part is to determine, in a color world, what is a neutral tone. Not to bad once you get used to it. The second thing is a stop watch. You will find times where you will want to do a 30 second, 45 second, 1minute 30 second exposures. Doing that one thousand one thing is tough to do in those timeframes.
If you have a DSLR, bring it along as a meter. The JPG you see on your screen will be pretty good as view of your exposure. With reciprocity failure in mind, adjust your exposure from a film chart download. You can't rely on the DSLR for anything much over 5 seconds as the digital file won't suffer from any reciprocity failure.
Do you have a few samples to post? I've got friends in K-Falls....if I'm down there, I'll drop you a line.....you can show me a few spots to capture some images
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote
Bookmarks