I photographed this frozen waterfall in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan in the late 90's. I was still shooting medium format film -- 6x7cm transparencies -- and in those days your exposures had to be right-on. There was no such thing as 'post-processing'. When film was developed, what you saw was what you got. That's why I relied on a hand held light meter used on incident mode. Our built-in meters today are 'reflected meters'. In other words, they measure the light reflected from the scene. Incident meters (you can recognize them because they have a white, hemispherical dome) measure the light falling on the scene. This system of metering is extremely accurate (except when trying to read a backlit scene). Notice that the highlight detail in the ice fall is exposed perfectly with rich texture and detail. That occurred because of the accuracy of the incident mode of metering. With digital, we take a picture and then tweak it in ACR or. Lightroom until it's perfect. The 'old fashioned way' was to get it right in the first place. I used a Mamiya 7 and a 43mm lens (equivalent to about a 21mm wide angle in the full frame digital format) for this shot, and I would have used f/32 and Fujichrome Velvia 50.
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