Re: spot, averaging, or incident metering?

Good question and excellent examples, Sharon.

I have a Pentax spot meter for my large format work. Why take 20 minutes to
set up a shot and not use a dead-on exact meter system.

I too like to walk about with less metering encomberances and have a Weston
Ranger 9 that I use with the [heavy] Graphlex 5X7 D. Here's what to do.

Absolutely first thing is to compare the readings, which you did, and find
they all read the same under perfect and controlled conditions.

Next, aim the meter into the brightest sunlight and 'wack' the cell into
action. Read the shadow, the highlight and at a forty-five degree angle,
read the brightest light off your hand. Yes, your hand. That gives you
Zone VI and will tell you how much the highlights are over and where the
shadowed light falls.

Works e v e r y s i n g l e t i m e.

Steve Shapiro
----- Original Message -----
From: "Shannon Stoney" <sstoney@pdq.net>
To: <alt-photo-process-l@sask.usask.ca>
Sent: Friday, September 30, 2005 12:45 PM
Subject: 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 23:41:15 2005