"sreenath" wrote in message
om...
Hi All,

I was reading Kodak Color handbook (a very old collection of booklets
from Kodak, possibly late 60's), where there is a long treatment of
various techniques.

There is a statement in that book that surprised me:

"Field studies have shown that pictures made using reflected metering
appear to be more pleasant than those made with incident light
metering"

I may not be repeating exact words, but this is the idea.

How is it that pictures made using reflected light metering are "more
pleasant"?

Thanks,
Sreenath

It doesn't surprise me in the least (let the flames begin). If you think
about it, incident metering makes little
sense in either vision or photography (another cue for dissenting opinions).
What gives an object color, shape, and texture is the light that it REFLECTS
back to your eye or your film/digital sensor. Take this to the extreme, and
consider that you want to photograph a black hole (so dense, even light
doesn't escape...remember that light behave both like a particle and a
wave)...it REALLY DOESN'T matter how much light falls on it, none is coming
back so it just appears to be a black area with no shape, color, or texture.
I'm sorry, but the human eye and photographic processes ARE NOT sensitive to
how much light FALLS on an object, only on how much comes back to the sensor
(eye, digital sensor, film, etc.).

So, careful (so as not to be deceived by a non-representative area)
reflected metering yields results more like what you see and attracted you
to the subject in the first place. Incident metering can yield results
unlike what you are seeing so if the scene is unremarkable, you might prefer
those results.

[INSERT OPPOSING VIEWS HERE]