Originally posted by acoufap Ricoh/Pentax should develop a small manual buildin viewfinder shutter for their DSLRs. Would be a nice little improvement for their cameras.
+! I agree 100% and I have found that some high end cameras of other brands provide a viewfinder shutter, apparently the Nikon D800 and D5 have this anyway.
Originally posted by honey bo bo This problem has been around since the invention of through the lense metering.
Yep, I'm sure it has and I can only say I am embarrassed to be at this point in my career and not have known this. Like I said above all the experienced photographers are reading this and saying "well duh??" Part of the problem of being self taught is these little things that you don't know but were probably taught on the second day of school if you were trained.
There are two separate issues here: stray light causing metering inaccuracies and stray light showing up in the image itself.
The metering problem is present on all exposure lengths when the view finder is uncovered and might be the cause of random poor exposures I see reported occasionally.
The stray light in the image problem is also always present (when the viewfinder is uncovered) but at most shutter times is such a small percentage of the total light that it is not noticeable. However, at very long shutter times (>2 seconds and up) it starts to be a noticeable percentage of the light shown in the image.
A third issue is the red streaks and tint seen in the images above. I do not know why they are red, maybe someone else can jump in and explain that. I used this ND filter on the coast last summer and got images with the red streaks in it, I blamed the filter and have not used it since. I can see now it was not the filter but my technique.