The Beginners Questions Area

Ever thought that some people would object to having their thoughts characterised as a 'rant'?
Anyhow. This is the open talk area, so as good a place to discuss it as any.
So, Hurter and Driffield, in a series of papers published between 1876 and 1890, established one by one the the basic concepts on which photographic practice was subsequently based. These included the modern concept of exposure, the concept of emulsion 'speed', based on a systematic method of measuring the effect of light on film, the characteristic (also called the Hurter Driffield) curve, the idea of 'correct' exposure, based on a rigorous definition, along with 'under' and 'over' exposure. For a century this was the basis of what beginners were taught about photography. Of course, they didn't learn all the thinking, discussion and controversy behind the work, they just learned the outcomes - that exposure was the illumination at the plane of focus times exposure time. That it was controlled by scene luminance, f-number and exposure time, that 'correct exposure' was an exposure that placed the range of scene luminance on the linear region of the characteristic curve. Fast forward to today, when most of the teaching materials available on the web are teaching something completely different - and if you argue those simple basics of photography on a beginners question forum, you'll be subjected to borderline offensive posts accusing you of engaging in PhD level technicalities and having p***ing contests.

Doubling down on being offensive? Go and read the draft users' guidelines. If I was someone that took umbrage easily, what you'd be doing here is starting the kind of acrimonious dispute that some people here complain about.

Why? You'd have to ask them. Maybe they don't know any better. Maybe they just plagiarised someone else's (propagation of errors is a sure way of spotting. plagiarism). Maybe they don't want to be the one that doesn't fit in. What I do know is that I've gone through YouTube exposure explainers and have found just one that doesn't contain major errors. I add posts letting the authors know where they went wrong. Now the YouTube algorithm notifies me, so I've seen quite a few. Just one that isn't fundamentally wrong. And if you think I'm not right, link two that aren't wrong. And if you manage that, be honest about how many you needed to go through to find them.

Typical is along the lines of 'exposure refers to the amount of light on the sensor' along with 'exposure is controlled by aperture, shutter speed and ISO'.

for instance, the relationship between ISO setting and noise.

It subverts the practice of photography, for which an understanding of exposure is central.

Is that an excuse?

The main argument was with a fellow called Captain W. deW. Abney. The papers are full of very polite shades against his approach. I love this passage, from 'Measuring the density of negatives', published in 'Photography', 1890. 'Having ourselves criticised Captain Abney's photometer adversely, we cannot complain if his criticisms of our instrument are possibly more severe than they might otherwise have been. We would have passed no remarks on Captain Abney's instrument were it not that we know that a repetition of many of our experiments, if made with his photometer, would lead to entirely different and, as we believe, erroneous results.'