by Eric Ruark

Created on: February 20, 2009

The Problem:

Highly reflective snow and beach scenes are a problem for most photographers unless they know how to compensate for their camera's automatic meter settings. Have you ever taken a winter scene and had your print ruined by a blue tinge? Or have you ever shot the family at the beach only to have the people appear dark against the bright sand or water?

Most modern cameras, whether film or digital, have internal light meters. These light meters are preset at the factory to meter for the most common photographs that the average camera owner is expected to take. The key word here is "average": shots taken at a family picnic; a birthday party; or a child's soccer match, for example. Beach scenes and snow scenes are not average.

In order to properly capture an "average" scene, internal light meters are set to expose something "white' to approximately 18% gray. (Each manufacturer is slightly different, but they all come in around 18% gray.) The reason the manufacturers have chosen 18% gray as their median has a lot to do with the early pioneers of photography, especially Ansel Adams and Edward Weston. Weston designed the light meter that Ansel Adams used. It was preset to 18% gray.

In his books THE NEGATIVE and THE PRINT, Adams noted that the color "white" was achieved by blocking light to the paper in the printing process. Therefore, pure white was nothing more than an unexposed section of the white photo paper. It was a blank space, devoid of texture or information. For information to print in a "white" area, that area couldn't be bright white. Any information that printed in the "white" space turned the paper slightly gray. Any perception of brightness is caused by a juxtaposition of darker shades. Something gray looks much "whiter" if it is placed next to something dark.

Manufacturers of light meters used Weston's 18% gray as a standand. By itself, 18% gray is a fairly flat color. But when placed amid other colors, it appears far whiter than it really is.

In his book, THE PRINT, Adams performed an interesting experiment using the Weston meter. He took a white horse and a black horse. First he metered and photographed each separately and then metered and photographed them together. When he metered the white horse and photographed it alone, the horse came out looking 18% gray, not white. When he metered the black horse and photographed it alone, it, too came out 18% gray, not black. Both horses appeared to be the same color in a photographic print because of

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