Practice Without a Light Meter

I’ve been a little slow with scanning my most recent batch of developed film, but today I got around to my first of two rolls.

Under hazy late afternoon sunlight, I shot a series of exposures as practice for my ongoing effort to learn how to shoot film without the aid of a light meter. Considering that I had Ilford FP4 Plus (ASA 125) loaded in my Nikon F, I observed the Sunny 16 rule and used 1/125 sec. as a “home base” for my shutter speed. I’m happy to say that, of the seventeen practice exposures I made on that roll, I deemed ten to be properly exposed, five overexposed, and only two underexposed.

A compositional device I’ve been finding myself often using especially when shooting in black and white is to look straight up at trees. There are certain clusters of trees in my area that I have been working, so I’ve been getting to know what makes for a good exposure for them. Here are a bracketed pair of exposures:

There were a lot of darker tones that I was trying to capture in this composition, so I couldn’t risk overexposing. I parked my aperture at f/5.6 and shot one at 1/125 sec. (left) and the other at 1/60 sec. (right).

One looks a touch underexposed, and the other a bit overexposed. But both are easily correctable simply by applying auto levels in Paint.NET:

Related to lookup straight up at trees is this photograph of a string of lights:

Since I was shooting straight up into the bright afternoon sky, I knew I needed to reduce the amount of light I was letting through to film. But I also didn’t want to underexpose the branches, so I chose a shutter speed of 1/125 sec. and dialed back my aperture a bit to f/11.

Not too much longer after snapping that photograph, my ears alerted me to the nearby presence of a certain hound dog whose owner loves to drive him around town in his Volvo hatchback. What’s distinctive about him is the way the dog hangs his head out the window as he barks non-stop out of sheer canine exhilaration. Between my wife and I, he’s come to be known simply as Volvo Dog. He never fails to bring a smile to my face whenever I see or hear him around town.

On this particular day, Volvo Dog’s owner seemed to have been running an errand, but he was nonetheless yelping his distinctive and persistent ARF! ARF! ARF! as he sat in the parked car. This was my golden opportunity to get a picture of him.

Feeling a bit self-conscious about getting “caught” even though I wasn’t really doing anything wrong, I quickly sized up the lighting on the scene, saw a pretty blend of brights and darks, and remembered one rule that’s served me well when photographing without a light meter: when in doubt, f/8. At that aperture, I shot the following trio of exposures at 1/125 sec. I attempted one shot:

...and another:

...and one more when he finally looked straight at me:

I moved on and saw my next opportunity for practice. I know the following shot is just a blank cinderblock wall, but I thought this was a composition whose harsh light obviously called for the equivalent of 1/125 sec. at f/16:

Yep, that was the right choice!

A few days later, I tried some inside shots. At a local store that was decked out for Christmas, I got this exposure:

This one was a bit of a tougher judge by eye since I do most of my photography outside. But I’m happy to see that I got this one right, too.

Not all of my exposures were perfect. Even with fading late afternoon light, I overexposed this shot by about a stop or two:

But as before, the negative was still quite usable. Again, all that was necessary was a quick auto levels adjustment:

All in all, I’d say that this exercise in shooting without a light meter was a success. I’m encouraged to do this kind of practice more often, and I’m particularly liking Ilford FP4 Plus more and more both for its wonderful tonality and its forgivingness. At the very least, it actually feels quite liberating to use a completely mechanical film camera and assess lighting purely by eye. It makes me feel like I’m far more of a connected observer than when I simply let my camera do the thinking for me.