Day Exterior Metering on Film

[gcconnelly]

Hi Roger and James — I’ve been curious to learn more about your methodology when exposing film, in particular when it comes to day exteriors. I know that some cinematographers have different light metering techniques for sunny exteriors. For instance some DPs choose to split the highlights and shadows, where as others try to keep fill side around 1.5 stops under, and key light 3 stops over.

Obviously, the way you set exposure varies depending on the intended look of the image, but I was hoping you might be able to break down a few shots. I feel like cinematographers talk a lot about how they rate film, but rarely get into the specifics of how they are actually metering shots:

For a shot like this with full hard front light, how are you choosing to place your exposure?

And then for the reverse, where we are now looking at the shadow side, are you keeping the same exposure, or opening up?

For a shot light this, are you taking the sky reading into consideration when setting exposure?

Alternatively, for an interior shot with strong contrast, how did you decide on your exposure? Are you just taking a incident reading on the face, or are you taking direct incident readings of the key and fill side and choosing something in the middle?

Really curious to hear your thoughts!

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