Control of specular highlights

I should be posting the second part of using a light meter but I decided to tackle another specular hightlight issue. The spoon in the above image caused me all sorts of problems. I wanted to show the shape and texture of the spoon. The shape of the spoon causes problems because from its point of view it sees a large majority of the room. To solve the problem I placed a huge diffuser over the spoon. This wasn't enough to show the curvature of the spoon, so I placed a gobo on the diffuser which resulted in the dark shape in the spoon. Now we have texture and curvature detail. Job done.

With a little help from the Sekonic L-758DR

This image was created with a heap of help from my light meter. Without it I would not have had full control over the Contre-Jour effect I was seeking. I needed to expose the background by one stop over my working f stop of f/10 to take the background to 255/255/255, pure white. But I also wanted to get a little bit of wrap around effect through the diffuse material out back. I ended up with f/22 on the background which gave me a high key effect plus a bit of wrap around light around the subjects face, body and limbs. The background ended up being 2 stops over the working f stop of f/10.

The beauty about the gear (light meter) I used for this shoot is that I had total control over the process.

I will be going through the process of how I used the incident metering option in my next post.

Light Meter Sekonic L-758DR 1 of 3

I seem to be spending more and more time away from the computer with camera in hand. Lightroom has certainly changed things for me.

Last week I got myself a Sekonic L-758DR Light Meter and it's fantastic! Why does anyone need a light meter? Most cameras these days have very capable in built reflective light meters that do a superb job. Hang on did I say REFLECTIVE light meter. Yup, that's where the problem starts.

We have two types of light metering available to us (assuming you have the hardware), Reflective and Incident. If you have a digital camera, you have reflective metering on tap. So how does this work?

The inbuilt light meter measures the brightess or luminance of the light reflected from the subject. Unless the overall tonality of what's in your viewfinder is 18% grey the light meter will give you less than optimal results. Lucky for us most mixes of light reflected in a scene results in about 18% grey and we will end up with a property exposed image.

The problems start if we have a scene that is not 18% grey. To further explain this, let's say we want to snap away at a scene made up of mainly snow, maybe we have a few people in the scene, but snow dominates! If you let the camera do its thing by metering the scene for you, it will produce an image that is underexposed. Why? Well, the camera exposure sensor is pre programmed and assumes that your scene is 18% grey (mid grey). The snow will therefore be underexposed and you will end up with a dark mid grey scene. These sensors aren't very smart. Not yet anyway. On the other hand, let's say we are shooting a bunch of very dark people working in a coal mine. Not likely, I know, but go with me on this one. The sensor will again assume an 18% grey scene. You take the shot and end up with a lot of grey people working in a grey coalmine.

Many photographers know the limits of the camera when in this situation and either expose brighter in the snow scene by either leaving the shutter open longer or opening up the aperture, or a bit of both. Or if in aperture priority more (AP mode) increase the EV (exposure valuation) by 1.5 to 2 stops. Bottom line is shoot around 2 stops over the "proper exposure" when shooting a very bright scene. If shooting a very dark scene and you want the result to replicate the actual scene underexpose the scene by 1.5 to 2 stops.

Part Two to follow next post.