Chapter 2 - Light and its Measurement

As the heading states, this chapter is all about light and its measurement and I like the suggestion of thinking "of the landscape of light and sky as a large studio". The text is clearly written with an eye on the UK weather and the need to take advantage of bright and sunny days when possible. Being here in southern Spain for the duration of this chapter, I am going to have the opposite problem, that of finding days when it is not bright and sunny!


It is no coincidence that this area is called the 'Costa de la Luz', the coast of light, but the downside is that it can be very harsh for taking landscape photographs apart from at the beginning and end of the day. Fortunately, being further south and an hour ahead of the UK, dawn is at a much more 'friendly' time, currently around 7am, so I intend to take advantage of this as much as possible.



I have had slight concerns about how much of the course material is geared towards film photography, as opposed to digital. This was also the case in the Level 1 'Art of Photography' course but, I understand, this has now been re-written. Clearly the course material was written at a time when digital was in its infancy and the majority of students would still be using film. I have no evidence to support this, apart from the explosion in the sale of digital cameras and the talk of film manufacture being reduced, but I suspect that a big majority of current students use digital cameras and process their photographs via computer. Perhaps the time has come for the material on the Landscape course to be re-written.


As an example, within Project 11 - 'the colour of daylight', there are several pages about colour temperature and colour filters which can be used to make corrections. At the end of several pages, the final sentence reads -

"With digital cameras, colour temperature corrections can be made in image editing applications such as Adobe Photoshop, limiting the need for a wide range of colour correction filters."

Also, I have pointed out to my tutor that the chart on Page 64 concerning the mired scale (micro reciprocal degree) is inaccurate in five of the first six figures given for the mired value of particular degrees Kelvin. I only know this because the first value on the chart was clearly wrong (dividing one million by 10,000 cannot make 56!) so I checked the rest (sad, I know). It would appear that this had not been raised before and, in any case, was not considered that important. I shall not pay it any more attention.

Measuring Light

I was unsure in this section, on Page 70, whether we were being advised to use Manual exposure mode rather than shutter or aperture priority (and it appears that this is the case) but that we should also use a hand-held light meter rather than rely on TTL metering.

As I don't own a hand-held light meter, I have borrowed one from a friend who runs the local camera club here and I have been getting familiar with it prior to doing the next projects. I was puzzled for a while about why the photographs that I had taken using the readings from the light meter were consistently under-exposed compared to those taken using TTL readings. Then it came to me; I still had my circular polarising filter attached to the lens!

Question. Can you use a circular polarising filter whilst using incident light readings rather than TTL metering? How do you know what exposure compensation to use i.e. how much do you open up the aperture to compensate for having the filter attached to the lens? I'm going to have to think about this.