spot, averaging, or incident metering?

Now that we've been talking about the zone system and zone III in particular...

Lately I've been experimenting with a little averaging/incident meter
that is very small and light. I used it as an incident meter for a
few weeks and just developed some of the negatives. A lot of them
are either over or underexposed. I was metering in the shade, with
the meter set at twice the speed I normally shoot the film at, as I
was advised to do on the BTZS forum. (When I tried metering at my
normal film speed, I got even worse results.) My tests had shown
that metering in shade at twice the normal speed gave the closest
results to my spot meter readings, which are generally pretty
accurate.

But since the results were rather spotty, I have been using the meter
in averaging mode recently. This seems to yield slightly better
results, but still not as good as the spot meter.

Am I doomed to carry around my heavy spot meter everywhere, even when
using small cameras? It seems that when I meter a scene with all
three meters, I rarely get the same reading from even two out of
three. I believe the spot meter, as I said, because I get very
consistent results when I use it. But the incident and averaging
meters only agree with it under rather special circumstances, when
the light is perfectly even everywhere and the scene is not too
contrasty. Like under overcast skies.

What do other people do, when they're carrying a small camera that
doesn't have a meter in it? Several of my favorite cameras are old
and don't have meters. Or maybe you have an averaging meter in your
small camera, and you also have spotty results. Do you carry around
a spot meter? Or just make do?

--shannon
Received on Fri Sep 30 13:43:31 2005