Originally posted by nomadkng To that, I'd add, with hardware generated images and software processing, exposure is a little more complex now. It's digital compared to analogue. With my K1000 I'd just turn the aperture ring and shutter speed knob until the needle was somewhere in the middle (because the iso was fixed by the roll of film I'd loaded) for the portion of the scene I wanted to meter. Maybe a little less than middle for prints and more than middle for slides (or vice versa, I forget now since it's been 10+ years).
But one only has to look at the debates swirling around ETTR to understand exposure in a digital world is different. Add in choice of JPEG or RAW post processing and it adds another layer. One of the most repeated pieces of advice I hand out is "learn to read your histogram." 75% of the time I get a blank stare, "What's a histogram?"
There's more to exposure than blinkies in the LCD. For any given image I may end up with 5-8 shots as I dial in my exposure for later processing. Shutter speed and aperture and iso are still the basics building blocks, but "what is proper exposure"? is now a valid discussion.
And it still is, but in the context of "what are you trying to accomplish". For example if I want high contrast on a cloudy day, I'm going to shoot histogram to the left, maybe leaving the whole right side of the histogram empty. If I want flat on a bright day, I'm going to shoot histogram to the right, even if I leave the left half of the histogram empty. If I wanted high contrast on film, I under-exposed and pushed. If i wanted low contrast in a high contrast scene I over-exposed and pulled. It has never been just "what is good exposure?", it has always been how do I accomplish what I want with what I've got. The only thing that's changed is the "what I've got."
So to turn it around, if you don't understand what you are trying to accomplish artistically, you can't understand exposure. Exposure, like everything else needs context.
Many people who say things were easier with film, were just never proficient with film. You still had to know a lot more than the average Joe, to produce better than "Average Joe" results.
People seem to not understand, photographers were, experimenting with saturation, contrast, exposure values, dodging burning, masking and doing all those things in the darkroom, before the digital age. It was just a lot more time consuming, but there's not much available now that wan't available then, unless you want to get into all the gimmick filters. There are more of those now.