 What can be more classic than a covered bridge? And what would be more appropriate to photograph that covered bridge than a wooden-filled camera? In this episode of Ride in the Edge, I'm back in another covered bridge for ongoing Covered Bridges of Oregon project. And while I'm out here, let's talk about the basics of metering. Let's get them along for the ride. My name is David Patton. When I started photography, I wanted to make art. I wanted to be a landscape photographer. But with a family to feed and bills to pay, I decided it would be better to be a working photographer than a starving artist. So I took a job as a photojournalist. 25 years and thousands of assignments later, it was time to go back to my first love. It was time to follow my passion. Come along on my journey to become the best black-in-white photographer I can be. Whether it be film or digital, I will be sharing what I learned through my successes and my failures and hopes to inspire and educate. This is my journey. This is Ride in the Edge. Now I'm too slow. I'm at Hoffman Bridge near South Oregon, trying to get a picture. I took one off the side. I wanted to take one from the center. It's kind of a redundant shot. It's shots from the center. I mean, it's really the... There's only a few shots you can get of Covered Bridges and I think I've done that so much. I was gonna try to set a shot here, but there's just too much traffic. Doing it with a large format camera is probably kind of silly. But I might still try. Problem is the light's changing. It's changing every 30 seconds. So I'll take a reading and then boom, light changes. I can see it changing. My first exposure I made with a yellow filter and I compensated an extra stop for that. And I'm trying to make a second shot on this bridge. And I'm gonna give it a couple more tries and I'm gonna do one without a yellow filter just because I need to work a little faster and sticking a yellow filter on there. It's probably not in the cards for the time it takes to do it, so. Got off another frame. Didn't do any critical focus, but depth of field is shooting pretty small aperture so I should get plenty depth of field. So while I'm out here, I thought I would talk a little bit about metering for your photos. I don't talk a lot about metering because most people shoot digital nowadays. And with digital it's just, I mean really, you're seeing what you're getting on the back of the camera. You've got histograms. The skill of metering the light is not as useful as it used to be unless you shoot film like I do. I don't think there's any mystery about using light meters. It's really pretty basic, at least the way I do it. So I'm gonna talk a little bit about it, just the basics, what I'm using, what I do. Now let me insert a disclaimer here while I'm setting up a shot at a different bridge. This next segment on metering is just my opinion based on my experience. I am no way trying to tell you this is the only way to do it. This is just how I do it. And these are the conclusions I've come to through my experiences. As you probably noticed, I use an incident meter. I actually recently heard a fairly well-known photographer say that these are only good for the studio. This is baloney, it's hogwash. I've been using one of these for years. There's this idea that you have to spot meter if you're a landscape photographer. You've got to twist yourself up all kinds of ways to find that perfect exposure. It's just not that complicated. It's pretty simple really. Let me tell you what you need to know. We'll just call this the basics of metering. Now there's two kinds of light meters, an incident meter and a reflected meter. The incident meter measures the light falling on the scene and a reflected meter measures the reflected light from your subject or the scene. Now I actually think the incident meter is more accurate, but honestly I could use either one. I carry an extra camera body with a spot meter in it and sometimes I'll use the spot meter if I need to. The really the achilles heel to this kind of meter is you need to be in the same light as your subject. Probably 80 to 90% of the time that's the way it is. I'm usually in the light of my subject. There are times where I may be shooting something far away and I might want to meter the light that was reflecting on that off the subject. So I might reach for a spot meter for that. But if I was only allowed to use this, I'd have no problems with it. I would much rather measure the light falling on the scene than trying to interpret the light reflecting off the scene. If you don't know, a reflected meter always tries to give a middle gray or also known as 18% gray reading, a tonal value. So in other words, if you point at a white wall, it's going to turn that white wall gray. If you point it at something black on the other end of it, it will turn that gray. So it'll either under overexposed. So the trick is when you're in nature trying to... Not so fast, David. Don't forget to say to get your whites white, you'll need to open up a couple stops and to make your blacks black, you'll have to close down a couple stops. Okay, carry on. So the trick is when you're in nature trying to anticipate what is the tonal value that I'm putting my meter on. Often grass will be a pretty good thing to meter off or maybe some rocks that have a 18% gray, middle tone gray value. I recently watched a video of a landscape photographer talking about how he made a bunch of readings on the scene and then after he did all that, to check his readings, he used the incident meter and went into the, where he was shooting and took the reading to make sure that his initial reading was correct. What makes me laugh is why not just do that in the first place? I think a lot of photographers have in their heads that they have to do a spot meter or it's not going to be accurate. There are definitely times to do a spot meter reading, but you're interpreting the tone you're putting it on. So I used to meter off my hand if I didn't have a gray card and I then opened up a stop or a three, four, some stop. I can't remember exactly what it was. And that was kind of my gray card that I would carry around. I just meter off that and then take the picture. And it, you know, most of the time it worked in a pinch or, you know, because there's so many shades of, like in grass, just in grass alone, there's so many shades of green and not all of them is going to be 18% gray. I've seen photographers take gray cards and put them in the scene and take a spot meter reading off of it. And I was like, well, if we're going to do, go to all the trouble doing that, why not just take an incident meter reading it's much quicker, it's just as accurate and it saves you a lot of time. If you don't own an incident meter, I'm not saying go out and buy one because that's on the way to meter. I'm just saying, if you've been told the incident meters are only for the studio, you've been misled. Whoever told you that really doesn't know what they're talking about. So if you can't find something that's middle tone, you'll have to interpret what tone you're pointing your meter at. That blue right there, in most cases, that's going to be pretty close to middle gray. So there'll be a lot of times when I'm shooting slide film that I would meter off the dark blue in the sky and that was pretty close to the correct exposure. With slide film, you want to be right on, man. There's no room for error. I shoot negative film, black and white negative. There's a lot of latitude there. If you've got a light meter that's got both incident and reflective, don't disregard that incident meter because it's going to give you an accurate reading if you're in the same light as your subject. But even a gray card, if you tilt it just a certain way, it's going to give you too much shine. It's going to give you a little bit off reading. And you can say the same thing for an incident meter. I tend to point my meter globe towards the camera and that seems to work pretty well for me. It's another reason to settle on a few films and really get to know them because you can kind of interpret what you're going to get from your readings if you're constantly going from film to film and not really understanding how much contrast you're going to have, how much latitude this film is going to give you. It gets hard to dial in the sweet spot for the films. These cover bridges are kind of one of my personal projects. They're one of my kind of passion projects. So when I finally got some decent light, I thought, well, it'd be a good day to get some images. And then some of these bridges I've shot with older digital cameras. And I think I can do better with my film cameras. So I'm revisiting a lot of the places I've actually shot before. Well, I think I'm going to end the video right here. I don't anticipate this being a long video. It's just good to get out and work on a couple personal projects. So until next time, thanks for coming along for the ride. As we take one last look at the images I made in this video, I want to leave you with this one thought. No matter how you decide to meter your images, the most important thing is you get out and practice. Whether it be a spot meter or incident meter, practice is what it takes to get consistent exposures for your images. So get out there and make something good. Have fun doing it.