Welcome Simon!
The Highlight and Shadow buttons deal with situations that neither
averaging nor spot can handle. An incident meter can easily handle them,
but Oly added another method that takes advantage of their spot meter
and requires no additional equipment.
Highlight is for situations like those houses some architects like,
where virtually everything is brighter than neutal gray. Use an
averaging meter and it all comes out gray in the slide. With the OM-3/4
metering system, you can take a spot reading on the brightest thing in
the room and press the highlight button. The camera will then set an
exposure about 2 stops less than the spot reading, making sure the
measured area comes out white, with all other tonal values falling in
place below that, regardless of whether there are any dark areas at all.
Shadow is for those pictures of a black cat in a dark basement, just the
opposite of Highlight. Spot meter a spot you want to come out black,
press the Shadow button, and the camera adds about 3 stops to the spot
reading. Of course experienced photographers with their wits about them
can do this with exposure compensation (plus film speed adjustment to
get to 3 stops for shadows), but the buttons certainly are easier,
quicker and less prone to silly errors or forgetting to return setting
to normal before further shots. Also, it is obviously set up for the
roughly 5 stop range of densities of the slide films used at the time of
the camera's design. Use it with color neg films and send it through
automated process/print and they will carefully try to adjust back to a
'normal' exposure. But they will do that with carefully incident light
metered shots too. :-)
Moose
Simon Worby wrote:
>So how do you know that you've over- or under-exposed (which, not knowing the
>cameras well, is, I assume, all "Shadow" or "Hilight" does) enough? Without
>reverting to an incident light meter, that is? (Or waiting till you get the
>piccies back!)
>
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