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I am not afraid of blowing out the highlights anymore.
How shooting film liberated me from the iron claws of this rule.
“You must never, ever blow out the highlights.” Many say you must deliberately underexpose every landscape. “Overexposed highlights are the first sign of a bad photographer,” the pundits will tell you.
There is truth to that advice, particularly in landscape photography. One cannot recover lost information, whether in highlights or the shadows. We have gotten so focused on pushing histograms to be just right that we have forgotten why we should care in the first place. “Autoexposure” and “Auto adjustment” in Lightroom reinforce the predominant style.
As with every rule, once you understand the why, you can ask why not.
You can experiment and ask: what happens if we ignore this rule? Do I like the print even better? This is where Ferrania P30 film stock comes in. It has such a high silver content that even a glimmer of light will turn the film negative black, making the positive paper print pure white. With Ferrania P30, all highlights are blown to pure white if you expose the film at box speed.
Some say Ferrania P30 is iso 50, not iso 80. Setting the iso below the box speed in a camera with an integrated light meter is the same as overexposing…
