Rosemary and Rosa 'Queen of Sweeden' 25 July 2024

 

I could not find my Weston exposure meter! The situation was desperate: the low sun was trailing the edge of clouds in the west, and shadow would soon dim the white crosses ... I suddenly realized that I knew the luminance of the Moon – 250 cd/ft2. Using the Exposure Formula, I placed this value on Zone VII ... Realizing as I released the shutter that I had an unusual photograph which deserved a duplicate negative, I quickly reversed the film holder, but as I pulled the darkslide, the sunlight passed from the white crosses; I was a few seconds too late! The lone negative suddenly became precious. Ansel Adams

A simpler explanation for the photograph that Adams took – Moonrise – Hernandez – New Mexico is that the moon was having a sunny day. Photographers in the last century used a rule called the sunny sixteen. If you had 100 ISO film in your camera and you wanted to photograph a scene in full sunlight the right exposure was f-16 at 1/125 second (or f-11 at 1/250 and so on)

In this century, with the proliferation of the smart phone the concept of a shutter speed is fading into memory (perhaps).

Every day of my solitary existence with my two cats my wife Rosemary is in my mind. I saw the lovely bloom of Rosa ‘Queen of Sweden’ and I wanted to scan it and to somehow connect the scan with my memory of Rosemary.

I have a negative file of family pictures I took early in Mexico. I found one that was most interesting as Rosemary has pigtails. I have no memory of taking the picture or that she had ever worn pigtails. The negative is I a file with photographs that look like I took in either Guanajuato or Michocán.

As I looked the picture I noticed that the background was over exposed. I modified the sunny 16 rule to accommodate the fact that Rosemary was in a shadow. My exposure might have been 1/125 at f-8. In order to get more detail, when I scanned the negative for this blog I worked on it with my 19-year-old Photoshop-8.

The whole action made me think that while the photograph was taken perhaps at 1/125 of a second, I am spending more time looking at the resulting scan. Was my memory of the original photograph also one of 1/125 second?

Some years ago, in the late 80s when I shot for logging company annual reports I charged $3500 per day, plus film expenses and mileage. An enterprising and perhaps funny engineer told me, “Alex, you charge $3500 per day and so much per hour. I calculate that you took 50 photographs at 1/125 of a second. I will calculate that in total time and pay you accordingly. It was really a joke. But it has made me think a lot today.

I have of late been using ½ second exposures with my digital camera to photograph rock concerts, new-music and dance.

Can this kind of photography be done with a phone? Is there an app that applies slow shutters with a phone?