When photographing an animal with dark hair on white snow, there is a fine line in being able to retain detail and texture in the snow as well as detail in the darkest portions of the hair. This porcupine is a perfect example. With film, there was no LCD monitor to get immediate feedback on the exposure, and there was certainly no post-processing RAW files to be able to tweak the highlights and shadows. For all of my winter shooting when I shot film, I used a Sekonic L-358 light meter on incident mode. This meant that the meter read the light falling onto the scene, rather than light bouncing back into the lens from the scene or subject. In this way, the bright snow couldn't fool the meter's reading. This technique is still valid today even with all our digital sophistication. I used the Mamiya RZ 67 for this shot along with a 350mm lens, f/5.6, and the shutter was 1/125. Virtually all my medium format pictures were done from a tripod.
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