Re: [Largeformat] Re: Photo 101 - Class 25 - Incident meters

[wd1346@airmail.net]

You photo purists create great envy in me.  I have long since lost 
patience with figuring everything out (metering, calculating 
recoprocity, bellows factor etc.).  I just guess and shoot a 
polaroid.  I know from the polaroid what my exposure should be and 
how the entire scene looks and what I need to alter if need be.  Once 
you become addicted to polaroid (charge it to the client mostly) then 
you can never go back to metering.  I never meter anymore and my son 
ran off with my meters anyway when he went off to photo school.  I 
went to Art Center College of Design and the school put more emphasis 
on Design and Composition than the technical aspects of photograph. 
We did have one class in photo math which was taught by a well loved 
little old wine maker looking gentleman.  I have many friends in the 
business who graduated from RIT who run circles around me in the 
technical dept.

Having said all that, I would like to cart my equipment out on the 
edge of some primeval cliff and photograph nature sans mankind---me 
and God sort of thing.  I will never really be a member of your club 
until I do I suspect.  However, as I get older I am looking more and 
more like Ansel Adams so at least that is a step in the right 
direction.

That may never happen though....my photo purist phase.... because I 
am lost to the evil world of Macs and Microsoft.  Instead of learning 
how to make platinum prints I spend all my time learning the latest 
techniques in Flash and Dos platform databases.

I think it has a lot to do with perspective.  In 1980 I traded in two 
Deardorff 8x10 cameras for one Sinar 8x10 Studio Camera and I still 
had to pay $3000.  I love my Sinars......but I would really love to 
have my
Deardorfs back!

--Bill Diebold