Do you practice that methodology with an 8x10 camera? In which case, you must need to have an elephant and mahout as assistants carrying your motorized 8x10 with all the necessary multitude of holders, and a commensurate monster budget. In those rather few cases I carried Velvia, it was likely a single holder for an entire trip. I had more versatile films, including black and white in the other holders. I could be a bit more generous in 4x5. But I necessarily allowed only one shot per subject. No room for error, no room for guessing, no opportunity to bracket, even if the light held steady. And what I've discovered is that a sniper with a single bullet is far more likely to hit a significant target than some machine-gunner who aims his gun all over the place. Even as a kid owning nothing more than an early 35mm Pentax with a single lens and rather crude externally coupled meter, I learned to do it right the first time on Kodachrome. Almost never an off exposure. Velvia was easy by comparison. But that doesn't mean Velvia is a versatile film. It has its legitimate usages. But most people simply want M&M brightly flavored candy, so that's why they use it. Galen was a nice guy just trying to make an honest living which supported his addiction to expeditions. I understand that. But being highly familiar with real mountain light, it's easy for me to smell something off which has been doctored up to exploit marketable stereotypes of natural beauty. Why gild the lily, or worse, dip it in melted M&M sauce? You're not going to improve it - you just cheapen that way! Burn all your damn postcards and cutesy nature calendars, leave your fancy cameras behind, and for once just sit there and watch what the light does, hour after hour in the mountains. Bathe in it, relish it. Maybe then you'll understand why I don't like hokey imitations. .... But no, I was not necessarily speaking of that specific cover image of Galen's, but of piles of them. Pretty much the same story. He had trouble with subject range, and depended too much on TTL metering. Again, I understand - it's kinda hard to use a real spot meter hanging from a rope. I doubt he even owned one. And sorry if I step on another set of toes; but more often than not, I regard resorting to grad filters as a default for not mastering the light to film ratio to begin with. Yeah, in color transparency work, where I began, the perimeter of the ball court tends to be significantly smaller than with black and white film. But in either case, it's essential to learn where those boundaries are. And that's why I'm perfectly comfortable going down to Zone I or even Zone 0 with certain black and white films, placing the beginning of shadow gradation way down there - because I had been routinely metering even more tricky things all along for sake of color chrome film. Don't tell me it can't be predictably done.
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Originally Posted by Drew Wiley
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