Quote:
Originally Posted by walwyn
Don,
The problem though is that if he took the photograph 10 minutes later or earlier the exposure would have been different. In addition we're not seeing the PP work that went into producing the image, the time the plate spent in the developer, the type of developer, or the dodging and masking involved in the printing. In addition to exposure being situational and transitory, we have no idea where he took the reading from, nor whether he overrode what the meter told him.
|
What you say is absolutely correct but... even without the exif we can say that he used a small aperture (because of the depth of field) and slow shutter speed (because of the movement in the cloud). If his intention was depth of field, then an exposure 10 minutes earlier or later would have had the same aperture but a different exposure time. Conversly, if his intention was a certain degree of movement in the clouds then his exposure time would be fixed and nthe aperture varied.
If someone wanted to take a shot similar to the one I posted of
water moving over rocks the exif tells us that this was taken at 1/13 sec. OK some rivers move faster or slower but it gives someone else a starting point. Similarly to freeze the action at the
Appleby horse fair I used a 1/500 and to get
this perspective in Victoria Square I used a 10mm lens on a 1.6 crop factor body.
I cant remember all that sort of information but the exif records it for me so I can learn for the future, and help others. Now OK Ansel Adams didn't have the luxury of cameras that encoded the exposure info into his negatives, but I wouldn't mind betting the he, and other greats of the times, kept records of how their images were captured.
Post processing, whether it be in the dark room or digital, can affect things like the brightness, or contrast the image, but they cant change perspective (lens choice) or depth of field (aperture - unless focus stacking is employed) of freezing of action (shutter speed)