The red, white and blue

[David Paterson]

This week our local hills had a heavy fall of snow, then a rapid thaw, then a deep freeze-up. It also gave us crystal-clear air which prompted me to do some "middle of the day" shooting - not my normal time for shooting landscape.

These images are a testament to the D600 metering and sensor. Converted to tiffs in ViewNX2 with no image-editing except reducing blue saturation, they were sharpened and cropped in PS CS6. That's all.
 

[Akira]

During the middle of the day in Tokyo, the lighting is too flat and boring, but in the areas of higher latitude like Scotland, the lighting seems to be oblique enough to emboss the interesting aspects of woods and mountains.  Your images, especially the first one, prove that.

If you didn't tweak any exposure-related parameters for these images, the meter of the now long discontinued D600 has proved to do an admirable job: the white snow is rendered correctly bright without losing the texture.

[David Paterson]

During the middle of the day in Tokyo, the lighting is too flat and boring, but in the areas of higher latitude like Scotland, the lighting seems to be oblique enough to emboss the interesting aspects of woods and mountains.  Your images, especially the first one, prove that.
If you didn't tweak any exposure-related parameters for these images, the meter of the now long discontinued D600 has proved to do an admirable job: the white snow is rendered correctly bright without losing the texture.

I agree with you about northern latitudes - certainly from mid-October to mid-March the sun is low enough in the sky to give useful light/shade texturing to most landscapes. I wouldn't have made these images without the exceptional clarity of the atmosphere that day.
I was very careful about what I metered, exactly, and I included quite a lot of sky and not much foreground, and I then did a 1/3 stop bracket around my basic exposure. Just three exposures, +1/3, 0,-1/3 but it was enough to give the D600 just a little help. I chose the brightest of the three brackets.


 

[Akira]

Thank you, Dave, for the tip.

According to my humble experiences with the Nikon DSLRs and Panasonic mirrorless cameras, the metering of Panasonic has always been more accurate, regardless of the lighting situation.  But, in retrospect, the meters of DSLRs might have suffered by the stray light entering from the viewfinder eyepiece.  I wear glasses and have always preferred to remove the finder eyepieces to keep the eyepoint as short as possible, which makes the stray light easier to enter through the ocular and mess up the light meter.  The mirrorless cameras are totally immune to this problem, and thus the meters can unleash their full potential even when used by a sloppy glass-wearing photographer.