Brief-notes #1: Just two stops
overexposed
I was limiting what I write here to be only +5000 words with +5 pictures, and a concrete and (I hope) rather developed topic. However, there are also shorter snippets I wanted to just casually drop from time to time so here we go.
Think about this series as an series of tweets or an Instagram story with too much text…
Last summer I had a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to go to Japan, and I took the photo below while on the bus in Tokyo.
However, that was actually the second try on this scene.
The first one was this below.
In my opinion, the composition on the second shot is weaker; it's less balanced color-wise (blue vs red) and overall a rather “meh” shot. Nothing special (like 98% of all my rolls anyways).
I took the second one wide open at f/1.4 using my camera's aperture priority mode at 1/500 with an 800 ISO film. However, the shutter speed "felt" (using my gut-light-meter) too fast to capture the poles’ red lights, especially given that the camera I was using (Nikon F3) has a center-weighted light metering system, just where there happened to be a rather bright screen.
So, naturally, the camera automatically exposed for this area, avoiding blowing up the screen itself. I mean, the camera had no business with what I wanted to do, and genuinely didn't even care about anything else other than having a correctly exposed center-area.
Hence, I gave it another try (first picture), ‘overexposing’ 2 stops (at 1/125), hoping to recover more light from the little red glowing buttons, at the cost of a blasting-lightning from the bus' screen in the middle.
Needless to say, I like the ‘overexposed1’ shot better because, even though the TV is glowing like a Christmas tree, we can still see a silhouette in front of it. Also, the red lights make it much warmer, contrasting with the blueish tungsten balanced film (Cinestill800t).
I also got a bit lucky in the second try because we were just in front of the red traffic light (upper left corner). So, overall, I'm very glad I gave it another try :)
Until the next one!
Álvaro Alberto
I mean, overexposed based on what my light meter reading was telling me.