A Little Trip to Borough Market with a Contax G2 – Part 1 – Kosmo Foto Agent Shadow 400 – By Joe Curzon

Great article. Thank you for sharing your thoughts and images. I have and really like the G1.

Nice shots! Ginger Pig is not world famous, no matter what they claim!
;)

Hi Joe,
Your posting was a nice surprise to read. My wife and I were there in late September. You Londoners are so lucky to have such a market. We dined on local breads, cured meat, a couple of Pimms. We were entertained by a busker and a little girl dancing to his music. I shot some pics w/my M4-P & a 35mm Nokton. All on HP-5. It was a delightful afternoon, one of best we experienced on vacation. I look forward to part 2.

If you expose for shadows and normally develop the film, then print for the highlights, and you have a lab process your film, then won't your highlights be overexposed? Now this depends on the subject and what you are trying to do.

So lets say yo're photographing a street scene at night. There are areas of light and dark. Perhaps people coming out of a theater that's lit. But across the street a dimly lit cafe' You can only expose for one or the other. I want the cafe' to look dark (well dimly lit) and the theater to look bright. Most people would just meter the entire scene and how the picture comes out, that's what they would accept. But since you know a lot about photography and are trying to be an artist, you're not just making a picture in B & W and accepting the picture as is, you want to have nice tones....good contrast and good shades of gray. So if you expose for the highlights and allow the darker areas to become dark, then they'll (the darker tones) will have a muddy look. To solve that problem, you can increase the contrast, but then you'll have no detail in the darker areas. Of course we all know if the difference between the darkest areas and the lightest areas are very far apart, then of course the dark areas can not have any detail. Now what LOOKS correct in a picture? Dark areas should look dark. So most people with a little understanding of exposure would expose for the highlights and ALLOW the dark areas to be underexposed. This would LOOK correct....dark is dark.

Now lets say we have a scene: An area with trees in the shade, and an area outside the trees in the sun. We place a person in the shaded area and expose for that area. The person will be properly exposed, and the bright sunlit area will be overexposed. But if we place the person in the sun and expose for that (the sun) Then the shaded area will be underexposed. And the picture will LOOK correct, because as I said before, dark should LOOK dark. But in B&W we want all the tone to have a rich vibrant look. Unless we are photographing a snow scene on an overcast day, then the scene is considered low contrast. Of course we COULD print the snow scene with high contrast, but that would not be the NORMAL contrast. So what would you do?

Expose for the shadows, develop for the highlights. What is really means: expose for the shadows where you want to retain detail, and develop for the highlights where you want to retain detail. In 35mm photography, our rolls contain images from a variety of subjects & lighting situations. Therefore, 35mm film processing is a compromise, you’re trying to arrive at a personal ‘sweet spot.’ The zone system w/sheet film offers the ultimate in exposure & processing control. It’s time consuming, demands a higher degree of precision at every step of the way.