I realised I wrote this before the previous post but forgot to
post it. So here it is
This is a very good post about the techniques of the zone
system for light metering. This is something that I have been looking at a lot
of late as I will buying a new digital light meter and want to be able to use
the reflected spot meter on it to become a more accomplished cinematographer I
feel there is a great need to learn all the light metering techniques one would
use and I believe that having the best light meter I can buy will really help
my development in this. So far I have been using an old western master 5
analogue light meter which has been very useful for incident light metering,
but I have started to find some shortcomings in the way it works that I believe
although not completely hamper my ability to get the correct exposure but could
start to hamper me when taking on bigger and more elaborate projects. The main
issue I find with this light meter is that is set to ASA rather than ISO which
means some of the settings don’t quite match. Another issue is that the gate at
the back is meant to open under certain lighting conditions when the meter
reads under a certain level but sometimes the meter reads slightly in-between
these numbers and it is hard to assess whether the gate should be open or
closed and I feel sometimes from my eye the lighting has changed yet the meter
is not showing this. Another issue is that sometimes when holding the button
down to expose I can see it reading a certain level but when I release this it
drops under which it shouldn’t do which means when positioning the meter in
place where I can’t read it, I am unsure as to whether the reading I am seeing
is the correct one. Anyway this is why I have decided to look for a new light
meter that I will purchase when my loans come in and I want to learn how to
read reflected readings as well as the incident readings I use now. From what I
have studied so far there seems to be a lack of articles about how to use
reflective metering, at least ones that make enough sense to try out. That was
until I read about this article. I believe that this article uses the
reflective spot metering system to get the correct exposure from the scene and
although the system is a little complicated I do understand it as a theory. I
think given time and practise I will be able to achieve this method practically
as from what I have read it takes some practise and time to get it correct.
The
system from my understanding works by applying a tone to a colour in terms of
black to grey. This works for digital by using a scale from 3 to 7, 3 being
black and 7 being white and 5 being middle grey which we will always try to
expose for. The system works by assessing a scene and applying the colours to a
tone from 3 to 7 with every step down from 5 being a full stop lower and above
5 higher. This means one can assess to judge what level the scene should be
exposed to in terms of knowing what the area we want to expose and what tone
and this fits into. Although I have probably explained how this works very
badly (this is because to some extent I am still trying to completely get to
grips with it myself) I feel that this article explains it well should anybody
want to read up on how it works without me wittering on trying to explain it in
my own haphazard way.
No comments:
Post a Comment