Shutterbug Strasse

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from the chemical daze . . .

Posted by Bruce from DC on March 9, 2006 at 07:13:52:
I regard all digital photography as "cheating" because there are so many post-processing tricks that one can do. :-)
What you have here is an essentially black car that dominates the field read by your exposure meter, and most "integrated" or "matrix" light measuring systems (e.g. the one that Minolta used) are weighted towards the bottom half of the picture. Nikon's "classic" center-weighted is not; it is symmetrical. I have not experimented enough with the newer matrix system (which is one of the choices on my 9-year old N70 film camera) to know whether it bottom weights or not; but I would guess that it does.
So, in the good ol' daze, to avoid all of these complications I would have taken my hand-held incident light meter and read the light falling on the car. If I only wanted to use one frame for the picture, that probably would have gotten me a useable negative with most color films, which would have printed an acceptable picture. Using Kodak Tri-X black and white film with the chemistry and development techniques that I used, there definitely would have been a useable negative and, in printing, I could have "burned in" any highlights and, if necessary, the sky.
You don't have one you say? Well, the Kodak Darkroom guide for black and white used to include a grey card which you can use instead; just fill the viewfinder with the grey card and make a note of the exposure value.
Can't find a Kodak Darkroom guide because the world's gone digital?
Do the compensation yourself. Read the exposure for the sky and for the car. Exposing for the sky give you what looks like about 1 f-stop underexposed for everything. Split the difference between the reading on the car and 1 f-stop less than the sky and take one shot . . . or just bracket that exposure with 1 f-stop on either side of it and take a total of 3 shots.
The use of a horizontal polarizing filter, by killing glare off of shiny surfaces, also increases apparent color saturation and darkens the sky. The filter comes on a rotatable mount, so you can rotate it for best effect. Sometimes, however, the polarizing filter will fool the thru the lens metering system (don't ask me how, or why). These are much more widely available that the gradient filters that Joe M is talking about.