Stop equivalencies and light ratios (oh my…)

When I was an undergrad, there was a mandatory photo class that you took as a Graphic Design major. I had my trusty manual 35mm SLR film cam, and two lenses: a  50mm prime, and a 200mm telephoto… all of which I got as a gift for Christmas and Lunar New Year (btw, it was not a very good telephoto — but it was a gift from a relative that I got in 8th grade purchased at a whopping 70$!). I think I had a polarizer and a haze filter also in the gadget bag, and an on-camera flash that must've been something like a GN20 or so.

I remember sitting through a few lectures at the time that only made partial sense. One was the discussion on Ansel Adams' “zone system.” I recall someone saying how it could dramatically improve our work (we shot and developed pretty much exclusively B/W as undergrads), but never fully understanding it beyond the reference to tonal range. The other was the “light stop equivalencies.” I pretty much metered everything in camera (I never once checked out the Minolta meter;-)

I also vaguely remember getting bawled out by a grad student in the darkroom for adding my prints to the rinser at the same time as hers. I pled ignorance (they never told me I couldn't in the class I had) to which she only became more irate at me, and insisted they 'needed a separate lab for grad students' to the lab monitor.

Well, here's to memories and the simultaneous “complexification” and “simplification” that the world of digital brought us.

We now have 1/3 stops ;-)

Here's a little handout from one of my classes (which makes a bit more sense to me now).

Enjoy!