Quote Originally Posted by mjs1973
Some parts of the sky were brighter than others.
That's what I was getting at. If your shot had a small section of sky (long lens, say 200mm) and you used a different exposure for every composition, they would be all the same darkness (assuming that you're trusting the in-camera meter, and using the reading it gave you every time, with or without the same exposure compensation). For example, say a shot really close to the sun gave you 1/250 at f8 and you shot it at that reading. It would be just as bright on your slide as if you swung the camera 30 degrees to the north, got a reading of 1/60 at f8 and used that reading for that shot. Naturally there will be differences between the two shots (color temperature of the light will be very different, etc) but overall one won't really look too much darker.

In other words, the brighter areas of the sky wouldn't look brighter because they weren't photographed that way.

You could take a spot meter reading on a section of sky and use that exposure regardless of where you pointed your camera. Now, I'm not saying that this would be the right approach for this shot or any other, and I'm not telling you how to have to do it. But the more you know about it, the more you'll be in control of exposure instead of the camera. Just a suggestion, and something to think about. I wouldn't always do it this way either - but a lot of times I'll take a spot meter reading a couple of degrees away from the sun, and set that at +1 (if it reads 1/250 at f5.6, I'd use 1/125 at f5.6 for example). With Velvia, I usually expose it at ISO50 so I might add 1-1/3 stops to the reading (some people just expose it at ISO40 to keep it easy).

Michael, I'm not picking on you - just trying to point something out to anyone reading this thread. There are a lot of ways that exposure can be determined. Hopefully this is just another tool for you to use, and hope it helps at some point.