Matt BlazeWho needs a light meter or a histogram? Behold the Posographe, an insanely beautiful 1922 mechanical computer for calculating exposure time based on aperture, time of day, sky conditions, and other variables.
French lessons not included.
Basically: you move the six sliders along the edges to correspond to your aperture and shooting conditions. That moves the exposure slider (which you don’t touch) to the correct shutter speed. There’s an absurdly complex system of internal levers that somehow doesn’t disturb anything other than the exposure slider when you adjust each input.
You can read more about it at https://www.nzeldes.com/HOC/Posographe.htm
I found mine on ebay a while back.
Update on the Posographe: there are four shutter speed pointers, depending on which of four emulsions you’re using. Based on the “sunny 16 rule” (set for f/16, portrait in the open directly sunlit, with a blue sky at noon in summer), I’d estimate the four supported ISO equivalents to be roughly 3, 8, 25, and 50. ISO 50 would have been super fast film for 1922, so this seems about right.
The "sunny 16 rule", for you autoexposure kids, is a rule-of-thumb for estimating correct exposure: On a bright sunny day, with the subject in the sun, use an aperture of f/16 and a shutter speed that's the reciprocal of the ISO value. So for ISO 50 film, you'd use 1/50th of a sec.
Steve Bellovin@mattblaze Way back when, I took many properly-exposed pictures without a light meter (an archaic phrase) and no auto-metering, just by reading the leaflet that came with every roll of film (another archaic phrase).
PeaceNick🇨🇦That piece of paper got worn out, when switching from 100 to 200 to 400 film.
I loved taking and developing b&w photos of the deep woods, sans flash, of light and dark, greys and water trickling. It was magic.
@intothewestaway @mattblaze When I do more artistic photography, I prefer B&W. These days, when I do mostly bird photography, color is better, though there are exceptions, e.g., this one from 1.5 years ago.
Coincidentally
@ct_bergstrom has some lovely feathery pictures just posted.