Camera exposure profiling is “interesting” but I chose to set clipping points on whole stops and call it Zone System calibration. Meaning instead of fitting camera to meter, I was fitting meter to Zone System.
I left the constants at factory defaults.
Your process does not work in this case. If you're shooting color chrome film, you want to shoot based on the exposure in the bright sunny light. If you pick a middleground between light and shadow, you;ll blow out the whites in the sunny areas. With chromes you pretty much ignore the shadow areas.
There is no trick, no rocket science, no mystery. The lumisphere and spot meter both have their critical applied uses. Neither is superior to the other in each and every application. With a spot meter (1° in the case of the Sekonic L758D/DRs)
• Meter a bright section of the scene, but not a bright spectral.
• Meter a transitional scene between bright and dark; and
• Meter a shadowed area, but not completely black
Areas that require special consideration by the meter can be double-tapped;
• Average all.
Simple way is to use a grey card, locked in as reference reading No. 1, then all the other readings and
averaged — very quick and efficient. Spot/incident/mixed metering is critical to a good exposure (but every photographer will have his/her own preference of what constitutes a 'good exposure' in their experience), but the process of metering should not be over-complicated!
The card becomes a fixed visual reference for judging the tones of things. I place the card on rocks, tree bark, dirt, dry grass, concrete,
The card becomes a fixed visual reference for judging the tones of things. I place the card on rocks, tree bark, dirt, dry grass, concrete, and so on, in an attempt to develop a mental catalogue of
the visual world in terms of what's the same, what's darker, what's brighter, and by how much.
There is no trick, no rocket science, no mystery. The lumisphere and spot meter both have their critical applied uses. Neither is superior to the other in each and every application. With a spot meter (1° in the case of the Sekonic L758D/DRs)
• Meter a bright section of the scene, but not a bright spectral.
• Meter a transitional scene between bright and dark; and
• Meter a shadowed area, but not completely black
Areas that require special consideration by the meter can be double-tapped;
• Average all.
Simple way is to use a grey card, locked in as reference reading No. 1, then all the other readings and
averaged — very quick and efficient. Spot/incident/mixed metering is critical to a good exposure (but every photographer will have his/her own preference of what constitutes a 'good exposure' in their experience), but the process of metering should not be over-complicated!
Sounds like well-travelled, domesticated grey card then!
Meter off the palm of your hand then add one stop of speed is old photographers trick. Of course make sure the light is the same on your palm as on the subject of the photo.
I use an incident meter, have for 40 years. I have a spot meter, nice one, never use it. Probably should. I do everything on variable contrast silver gelatin paper so I can get away with a lot.
That palm trick based on the notion that every ethnicity has the same palm value is a myth.
But one's own palm might be somewhat predictable provided their own exposure to the sun
stays relatively consistent over the seasons. This seems to stem from an era where the majority of portraits (at least in western culture) were Caucasian, and typical films had a fair amount of latitude.
Here in this foggy coastal climate, the back of my hand and the palm are almost identical, except for some freckle-like age spots.
On the other side, my meter is an L758DR (Sekonic) for more than 25 years, and all of my metering is multispot/mean-weighted averaged. I very rarely use incident in mixed light — no recent recollection of its employment.
I too mostly use the gray card as a visual reference for 'middle tone' of surrounding objects, rather than as a meteing target. But just as the gray card makes a variable density due to surface reflectance while metering, that variabillity of apparent desnty can manifest itself as a variable tonal reference! One needs to keep both in mind whenever a gray card is employed.
This illustrates both the variable tonal reference as well as variable metering target!
At the same time, an incident light meter's angle to the sun position, and angle relative to vertical both make a difference
IOW one needs to understand that foibles of BOTH the gray card target and the incident light meter hemisphere in order to optimize the use of each.
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