I have an enlarger, and even something of a primitive dark room now. I’m very excited. A couple of weeks ago I sat down and fumbled my way through my first prints, and I discovered something: the light meter in my camera sometimes tells little fibs. Sometimes the light meter in my camera tells whopping lies. Many of my favorite negatives, I have discovered, look something like this: good subject, good lighting, good composition, crap exposure. Usually, there isn’t enough contrast between the blacks and the whites—they’re a sort of flat grey with some detail (I’ll post an example shortly to demonstrate what I’m talking about). Sometimes they’re just dark. Sometimes (though rarely) they’re just bright.

My first thought was simply that I did not know how to make a print. That thought faded pretty quickly, not because I am confident in my skill, but because hours of trial-and-error on one particular negative gave me nothing but a freakin’ Dektol headache. Next potential culprit: the light meter (or my reliance on it) So I started reading about exposure. Turns out, I didn’t know the first thing about how to set the exposure on my camera.

The first thing I learned: ignore the built-in light meter. This may not apply to your camera, but it certainly applies my 1976 Pentax MX. It’s not that the meter is inaccurate or imprecise: Far from it. It’s just the way that it works. Most light meters average together the brightness of all or nearly all of the frame (my MX uses a weighted average, biased towards the center of the frame). The idea is simple enough: In an average frame, there will be equal amounts of bright and dark and they will be evenly distributed over the frame. If this is true, then we should choose an exposure that renders the average as middle grey. In so doing, this choice of expsure ensures that the bright areas render brighter than middle grey and the dark areas darker than middle gray. Great—but wrong.

Exercise for the reader: What are the implications of using this method of determining exposure?