I took this shot of the Oregon Coast in the 80's with my Mamiya RZ 67 medium format film camera. I revisited this spot when I lead a photo tour here about four years ago, but we didn't have a great sky. We've all been using digital cameras now for about 20 years, and it's hard to imagine back in the day when you couldn't see your images until you returned home and had the film developed. That meant the exposures had to be spot-on. At most, with transparency film you could be 1/2 f/stop too light or too dark and still have an image considered exposed correctly. Beyond that, the images were worthless. Back then there was no such thing as 'tweaking a RAW file with respect to exposure'. Taking accurate light readings was everything. For 25 years, I used a hand held light meter that was extremely accurate. Most of the time, I used incident mode. However, I couldn't use it for backlighting, i.e. sunsets. I had to switch to reflected mode and identify a middle gray (or middle toned) area of the sky and take the reading from that area. That, in itself, took a lot of practice. My settings were unrecorded, but they were probably 1/4, f/32, and for all my landscape work I used Fujichrome Velvia 50 slide film.
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