I photographed this elk at Castle Geyser in Yellowstone back when I was still shooting film. For years I’ve debated in my mind whether or not to clone out the hexagonal flares that occurred because I was shooting directly into the sun. As you can see, I still haven’t removed them. In the mid-90’s, I was shooting with the Mamiya RZ 67 medium format camera, and rather than use the metered pentaprism that was available, I elected to use a hand held light meter, specifically the latest (at the time) Sekonic meter. The problem with backlighting is that a hand held meter doesn’t work. It reads light accurately falling onto a scene (in incident mode) if the light source is above, in front of, or to the side of the subject or scene, and it also works by reading light reflected from the scene (on reflected mode). In this instance, to determine the reading, I’d either have to use my brain/experience to establish the settings by eye or use the reflected mode and identify a middle toned area of the composition, i.e. the blue sky above. In this case, time was of the essence. I didn’t want the elk to move, so I quickly (and manually) set the shutter and aperture to 1/250 at f/11 with Fujichrome Provia 100 and got this shot. Many years earlier, the editor of Petersen’s Photographic Magazine, Paul Farber, taught me how I could learn to judge light and exposure without a meter. That lesson held me in good stead for 30 years until I went digital.
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