As my previous post explains, I’d gone to Vauxhall to photograph a protest by cleaners at Capgemini who were calling for the London Living Wage and an end to racist discrimination at work, as well as fighting the threat of redundancies. I’d arrived early, taken a short walk and digitally re-photographed a panorama I’d taken on film almost 14 years earlier.
Usually on the digital cameras I work with auto-exposure in P mode. The Nikon exposure system is generally smarter than me and also allows a flick of the thumb to give me a different shutter/aperture combination while keeping correct exposure. Almost the only time it doesn’t work is with flash, where it almost works with flash fill (and will work with a little tweaking) but fails when you want flash as the main light source and generally shutter priority (or occasionally aperture priority) is your best bet.
The other exception is panoramas. Although the PtGui software can cope with frames with different exposures it is still best to decide on a suitable manual exposure and take all the frames using that – and with a fixed manual focus. So I’d put the camera into manual mode, with the correct exposure for the light in the open area by the river.
I’d been surprised to find the cleaners in the bus station, and rushed to join them and take pictures, and in the rush left that camera at those same manual settings. The end of the bus station was in fairly deep shadow, and I think the day had become even gloomier, with the result that – until I noticed a few minutes later – I had taken pictures that were perhaps 3 or 4 stops underexposed.
I’m not a fan of ‘chimping’, as looking at images on the camera back while taking pictures disturbs the connection with the subject which for me is vital. Few things too are more annoying than photographers who stand in the way of others (or rather of me) looking through the images on the backs of their cameras. But just occasionally it makes sense to stand back from the scene and at least have a quick view at the histogram, and when I did I got something of a shock.
If I’d made the same mistake working on film, I would simply have had to write off those pictures – and might well have gone on for much longer until I’d finally noticed the error in the viewfinder, either by spotting the little ‘M’ or noticing that my exposure values weren’t changing. I’m generally so engaged in the image that I just don’t notice such things.
Also on colour negative film, it would have been difficult or impossible to really recover those images. If I’d realised, changed films and marked the underexposed roll, pushing development was never really much of an option with colour neg, and with transparencies a 2 or 3 stop push generally produced interesting graphic effects rather than pictures.
Lightroom does a rather better job, although for the first time ever I wished that its Exposure slider went past the +10 that I used for this image.
Lightroom’s exposure slider at +10 for this underexposed image.
It isn’t perfect, but doesn’t really stand out as being too much different from the pictures I took with the other camera body which got the exposure correct – such as this example:
A correctly exposed image developed with Lightroom’s exposure slider at 0.
It is possible to see the difference, even in these small versions, but probably most viewers wouldn’t notice it unless it were pointed out. Digital copes much better with underexposure than film.
Where film – and particularly black and white film – does better is with over-exposure. Although digital cameras have improved a little over the years (and RAW processing software too) it’s still fairly easy to produce completely washed out highlights.
I have most problems with flash, which seems occasionally simply and randomly to deliver rather more than it should, but it isn’t unusual to get a problem in other images. The occasional peek at the histogram (or a ‘flashing highlights’ image display) can be useful, and I generally work with a third of a stop exposure compensation to give me just a little more headroom – and you need it to get that fill flash right, with the flash set at around -2/3 or -1 stop, as the camera seems to ignore the contribution from the flash in its exposure calculations.
The cleaners want Justice.
More pictures and more about the protest at Capgemini Cleaners Demand Living Wage.
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My London Diary : Buildings of London : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage
All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated are by Peter Marshall and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.
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