A few weeks back now I went to Louisville, KY for the View Camera (magazine) Conference – the only way to see the distributor in the USA of my Silvestri. Never been to Kentucky before, nor to Indiana which I toured on the way back. Eight hour drive each way is not my favorite. I did stop on each way for a night and have a hike and some photo taking.

There was a small trade show at the conference and I had an interesting chat with the product manager from MegaVision (interesting new true black and white digital backs, no Bayer) reviewing the benefits of ETTR (expose to the right, that is, get as much data up in the populous high-end photosites but don’t clip your highlights) compared with spotmetering and placing your desired significant highlights in the desired zone (which most people believe means you have less data to manipulate in your shadows and so can lead to banding and noise). My experiments on variations of the latter so far suggest that this can be a good tactic with the E-1 at least (which I have had trouble getting exposure right third time let alone first time and still get undesirably blown out highlights).

Now we are in Chicago and this is the view from Joan’s building, metered from sky, jpg from camera.