A proper exposure for me is one which which results from:
Look at the scene and it's lighting.
Decide how it should look when "developed".
Set the aperture and shutter knobs according to learning and experience ... or my trusty battery-less Sekonic 😀.
Everything else left at default.
Ker-lick!
That's fine. As I said many times, it means different things for different people.
* exposure - amount of light that struck the sensor per unit area while the shutter was open.
no comment
That's fine. I didn't ask for one.
It's always good to have your approval ...
For myself I don't mind taking the time for ETTR and for raw photography a lot of what I do find taking the image as one of the enjoyments in a long chain of events that are required in the making of the photograph
I didn't approve or disapprove anything.
Yep, I'm pretty much the same. I like to ETTR as much as possible on every shot, whether hand-holding or using a tripod. How close I get to optimal exposure** depends on time available, the situation I am in and my final goal for the photo.
JimKasson's BlackJack analogy is very good. I don't always need 21. Very oftten 18, 19 or 20 is good enough especially when photographing in good light.
* exposure - amount of light that struck the sensor per unit area while the shutter was open
** optimal exposure - the maximum exposure* within dof and motion blur requirements without clipping important highlights.
*** under exposed - more exposure* could have been added with the DOF and blur constraints still being met without clipping important highlights.
What's wrong with Exposure time?
Nothing is perfect in real world but that's a different thing.
H = E * t in its various incarnations, H_e, H_v, H_ph, H_m etc. (likewise E_e, ...) uses Standard International unit notation so that things not get confusing once one starts digging deeper into the subject.
It's an age thing. If you're as old as us you learned E = I × t. During the 60's and 70's science became internationalised, adopted the SI system and more standardised signifiers were used. So E for 'exposure' became H, 'I' for intensity became 'E', and 'T' for time remained as it was. It is as you say the same formula just with different letters. The point I was making is that Porky, who likes to criticise Danno's explanation of exposure, cannot recognise that it is the same as E = I × t but in a different form. He claims differently now, but that is standard behaviour for this individual, who is actually learning while trolling (an interesting concept) but since his starting position was that he knew it all anyway, must deny it. The problem with the troll is that it creates currency for the idea that Danno's formulation is actually wrong in any substantive way - and it isn't.
Nothing, except the exposure time may be set to 1/100 while light hits for only 1/500. Or light painting.
Oh, good one, all our angst about how the camera gates light doesn't take into account light that doesn't have a constant intensity. Reminds me of an article in a photography magazine from long ago about a fellow who'd set up a view camera on one slope of a valley, open the shutter, then run around the other slope setting off all sorts of illumination. Neat images...
But all this preciseness of language really detracts from the problem at hand, considering so-called "proper" exposure. Me, I'm really getting reinforcement here for my perspective, "proper" is a poor adjective to prepend to the word "exposure". The needed exposure for an image depends on what you're trying to do...
IMHO another problem is that the light spectrum is ignored in all popular definitions, and thus we end up with colloquialisms like "blue channel is strongly underexposed", or don't have means to formally and uniformly describe what was the exposure for a shot combined from 3 exposures made with colour separation filters, while a customer demands a valid EXIF ;)
Indeedy!! Spectrum aside, What Do You Record for the exposure tags in EXIF of a HDR amalgam JPEG? Or, a conglomeration of a stack of 19,000 captures to render the Milky Way?
To mis-appropriate Paul Simon, There are 50 ways to leave expose your lover photograph... 😆
I think that all definitions involving light intensity automatically include a spectrum i.e. the CIE luminous efficacy curve.
What I doubt is the usefulness of such inclusion without allowing for exceptions, that is without a possibility / option to describe particular exposure conditions.
