Amateur Photographer Magazine

The Final Frame - Roger Hicks

Thursday 4th March 2010

Roger Hicks

Here are two scenarios. One will be familiar to most of us. The other will almost certainly not be, but we've all seen it in movies.

For the first, you arrange to meet someone in the pub at eight. For the second, it is wartime and you are on some desperate commando mission to blow up an enemy installation, also at eight, or 'twenty hundred'. There are three groups. At five minutes to eight, one group is to detonate charges elsewhere, as a diversion, and another group is to set booby-traps on the escape route, to be activated at five minutes past eight, while the third group carries out the demolition. Rendezvous for all three groups to make good their escape is set for quarter past eight. Anyone who is not there at a quarter past eight will be left behind.

Fairly obviously, timing for the former is not critical. You can saunter over at a quarter to eight, or even at half past seven, and have a pint before your chum gets there. In the other direction, if either of you turns up 15 or even 20 minutes late, it is unlikely to matter, though if the other person didn't turn up, you might well go home after an hour or so. Equally obviously, lives are at stake in the latter case: hence the famous (and inevitable) 'Synchronise watches!' scene.

Perhaps surprisingly, you can draw a close parallel in traditional silver-halide photography. Even half a minute's variation in development time is quite likely to make a significant difference. Yet when it comes to washing the film, provided you haven't used a hardening fixer there is no effective difference between ten minutes and an hour. Indeed, five minutes should be enough.

I know developing your own films will not be as much a part of the average AP reader's world picture as it was 20 years ago, so let's take an example from digital exposure. At least if you're shooting raw files (DNG and the like), you can dig out a lot of information from a badly underexposed file, much as you can if you scan an underexposed slide. Overexpose, though, and you'll soon blow the highlights to a featureless white. If you use auto exposure, you may even care to set the exposure compensation at -1/3 or possibly -2/3 stop, in order to give yourself a bigger buffer against accidental overexposure. A whole stop, though, is probably too much.

Now switch to an 8x10in camera, shooting landscapes on black & white negative film, with a view to contact printing. Quadrupling the metered exposure at the stated ISO – giving an extra 2 stops, rather than 1/3 stop less – is unlikely to have any adverse effects, apart from giving you a denser negative that takes longer to print. Yes, the grain will be a bit bigger, and sharpness will be slightly reduced, but this is not going to be detectable in a contact print. You may even prefer the tonality with the extra exposure.

Finally, consider a scenario that many of us like to try from time to time. Pick up an old unmetered film camera, stick a roll of negative film in it (colour or black & white), and take some pictures. Guess the exposures, but err (or bracket) always on the side of overexposure. You may miss the occasional picture, and you may get less than the optimum exposure in some of them: the loss of sharpness and bigger grain may be detectable if you're shooting 35mm and enlarging to 8x10in, although it probably won't be if you're using an old roll-film folder. The point is, you'll enjoy yourself. Why do it otherwise?

What is really weird is that this last scenario provokes some photographers to incandescent rage. I have been told, flatly, that if I don't use a meter at all times, I clearly don't care about my photography. After more than four decades of taking my photography fairly seriously, and more than three decades of earning part or all of my living from it, this struck me as a rather odd assertion.

My interlocutor's hardening of the categories – his unshakeable belief that serious photographers always use meters – seems to me to be only one aspect of a profound ignorance about what's appropriate, and when. It takes one tiny aspect of human experience, and turns it into a universal rule. AP

Roger and Frances website

Got an opinion on this story? Why not post a comment on our message boards

Back to index