how do you spotmeter with slide film?

Thinking of doing another day trip to yosemite to try and catch the firefall and other shots. Last time i was there a month ago i used my mamiya 6 to shoot velvia 50. Almost all the shots were shot it high contrast lighting as that was the lighting that day. Blown skies and or black shadow areas. I just cant seem to get a feel for the meter in the camera. So i will try to use my spot meter for the color as well as my black and white. I guess im spoiled by nikons and pentax's great matrix meters.

Anyway.....
Should i just spotmeter a higjlight and add two stops and let things fall as they may or should i meter a few different things and average them. I am sure the lighting will be high contrast again. I know its not ideal but im there so its that or nothing. I could shoot black and white in the mamiya and color in my pentax 67 but i hate cutting 6x7 slides to fit a 6x6 mount hence the reason for the mamiya 6. I will be using a gossen ultraspot meter

Thoughts? Thanks.

John

destroya said:

Should i just spotmeter a higjlight and add two stops and let things fall as they may or should i meter a few different things and average them. I am sure the lighting will be high contrast again.

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A spot meter is used to help you identify the exposure for the most important part of the scene. If you know the latitude of the film you are using, you then consider how you want to balance the whole scene's exposure. Given that you were not successful with Velvia 50 in that high contrast scene - and that is what the lighting condition will be yet again, I would suggest using something else that can give you enough latitude or shoot in less contrasty setting. Unless of course your previous failure can be adjusted with spot metering.

destroya said:

Blown skies and or black shadow areas.

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Welcome to slide film. If you're getting both blowouts and black shadows, there is no exposure setting in the world that is going to claim back both. Pick one to fix and live with the other (I'd generally get rid of blown skies and deal with muddy blacks, but that's me and I scan my E6).

I pretty much work with spot-metering the brightest large object (like clouds) and taking off a stop or two depending on the film. Don't bother metering small objects like streetlights or specular reflections, they'll blow out no matter what and best to sacrifice them.

Still, I'd recommend just avoiding the situation entirely with any of:
- Use negative film.
- Or at least something less-contrasty than RVP50 (which is pretty much any other film I've heard of besides Rollei ATP 1.1).
- Use Grad ND filters (ok, not very feasible on a rangefinder, but it'll work on the Pentax 67).

the ND grads are a real help, but i tried and had many epic failures trying to use them on a rangefinder. many of the shots went into a slide tray i call the hall of shame, totally screwed up, operator error shots. why not make use of them.

guess ill just have to pick my spots and stick to B&W.

Or use a regular light meter, incident or reflective. Why make life hard?

Sirius Glass said:

Or use a regular light meter, incident or reflective. Why make life hard?

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You must be referring to external spot meters?

With the latitude of most color C41 and b&w, spot metering may be unnecessary. However, using spot meters in my cameras gives me that extra level of control and certainly not hard by any means.

So, you are using Gossen? I suggest to set your meter to ISO 40: http://jaz99.blogspot.com/2016/01/velvia-50-iso-sensitivity.html

The range of the slide-film is rather limited to 5-stops. Just one incident meter reading when dome pointed towards the camera will give you the best exposure.

baachitraka said:

The range of the slide-film is rather limited to 5-stops. Just one incident meter reading when dome pointed towards the camera will give you the best exposure.

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+1. wouldn't bother with a spot meter.

Sirius Glass said:

Or use a regular light meter, incident or reflective. Why make life hard?

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I agree entirely why overcomplicate things photographers shot beautiful landscapes before spot meters were invented.

I have shot nothing but Velvia 50 so long now I cannot recall the last time I shot another film. With that said, you are limited in high contrast situations. I only shoot during the sunrise or sunset cycles. Basically low contrast points of the day. I also, if necessary, employ a grad or reverse grad depending upon the highlight area. What I've found is after so many years of shooting the same film you develop a keen eye for what will not work more so then what will work.
All of my work is through RB67 viewfinder or 4x5 for placing grad lines, have no idea how that can be done effectively with a rangefinder. What I do is stop the lens down with the f-stop set and slide the grad up and down to place it, again, not sure how with a rangefinder it would work.

I shoot Velvia 50 with a 10% central weighted reflective lightmeter aimed at mid tones like grass or leaves, maybe averaging a couple of readings. Or use incident. I then bracket +1 and -1 stops. With early and late day lighting, it's often easy to get the initial reading wrong.

Transparency film is beautiful to look at on a light box. It has the narrowest dynamic range of all color film. What I recommend is to make creative decision on what you want within the film's limitations. Compose the shot with a narrow range of light, use graduated ND filters, use polarizing filters if the situation allows it. If you use sheet film, you can pre-fog your film to add some density in your shadows. I used to use chrome film for commercial clients and proofing with Polaroid is a must. One trick I haven't tried is to over-expose your film and pull process. If you do, it will cause color shifts. Some artist see limitations with your material as a creative catalyst

I've never used a Gossen spotmeter. I do use Pentax 1 degree spotmeters and highly endorse that method for selectively comparing discrete values in
the scene. And I've done a LOT of mountain photography in my life, in both color and black and white. But mainly, it's a matter of practice with a particular meter and film and getting accustomed via trial and error. You might want to rethink Velvia. It's just about the most finicky film I can think
of in high contrast scenes. Learn the basics before fiddling with neutral grads or polarizers (neither of which I ever use myself). And the remaining
chrome films like Velvia don't respond well to "pull" processing.

(Got interrupted) Basically, a scene like that is going to have too much contrast range for color film, so it's probable that you'd sacrifice some of the
shadow areas to black rather than washing out the color the backlit color in the firefall itself. An accurate spotmeter lets you do those kinds of comparisons in a manner no incident meter would. But you still have to establish a reference point. Of course, you can also hedge your bet by bracketing the exposures if you're at least in the ballpark, provided the light holds a few minutes. It helps to practice first in a less extreme situation.
Lets say it's midday in Yosemite instead, and you've got that big granite wall up there. Find some part of it you want equivalent to "middle gray",
Most of the granite will be one or even two or more stops brighter than that. But there may be a patch or two. Or road asphalt makes a good equivalent to a gray card. Green equivalent to a lawn is also around middle gray with some meters, though the evergreens on pine trees in about
a stop darker, and brilliant yellow-greens of foliage about a stop brighter. Then by testing in advance with your chosen film you learn to recognize
the parameters. Velvia is only going to give you about a stop and a half in either direction from middle gray with decent color reproduction. But
learn go get to First Base first, meaning consistently recognizing middle gray.

A spot meter can be useful for slide film. slide film goes from about -3 (black) to +2.5 (white).

So if you want something to appear as almost fully white (eg how a fluffy white cloud looks), put it at 2 to 2.5. Etc

It's hard if not impossible to fit contrasty scenes into slide film, especially if you have skies and shadows. 5 or 6 stops isn't much. Camera meters sometimes make a hash of it, trying straddle a scene that slide film simply can't cover. Often a decision to focus on highlight or shadows makes more sense.

If you must have it all, you need to cut your dynamic range, et ND grad filters, flash, etc.

Again, a spot meter is a fairly precise tool for assessing all this, but any sort of centrally weighted meter works too...

I had the same problem with Velvia 50. You could try Provia slide film instead. It has more latitude and produces very high quality results (superior to Velvia 50, but that's just my opinion)

Provia is actually Velvia in disguise! The change is the palette saturation and yellow/greens, which as everybody will see are much more subdued than Velvia's. Provia is considered a "cold" film which often needs a warming filter e.g. early in the morning to overcome its sterile depiction.

"Contrasty scenes" should not be given to Velvia, which is a contrasty film to start with. Diffuse light which fills in shadows and dulls spectrals works wonders, moreso with a polariser and careful spot metering (in very flat light, a single incident reading can suffice). I expose Velvia at 50, EI32, EI40, EI64 and EI80 to suit conditions/mood.

The settings of a meter (incident or spot/multispot) and the averaging type (random-point averaging, CWA or mean-weighted averaging/bias) can have a bearing on exposures e.g. setting the meter to 0.3 steps if you are using 0.5 at the camera. I could probably make a competent photographer proficient in spot meter use in just one trip out into the bush.

trondsi said:

I had the same problem with Velvia 50. You could try Provia slide film instead. It has more latitude and produces very high quality results (superior to Velvia 50, but that's just my opinion)

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Provia has no more latitude than Velvia - it just that it's dmax is a lot less and so looks like it does when placed on a lightbox.

Velvia 50 actually as about a 1/3 of a stop more than Provia but you need a drum scanner (and a good one at that) to get all of that shadow goodness out.

In tests, Velvia 50 has just over 8 stops of dynamic range. If you rate Velvia 50 at ISO 40 then the range goes from -6.333 to +1.666

In reality, the darkest couple of stops in the shadows suffer from colour shifts and can be very grainy - hence they should only be reserved for 'tonality (a textural black). so when you're metering for a drum scan I would use -4 to +1.666 (for a typical ccd scanner I would say -3 to +1.666)

So, find the highlight that you want a little texture to and place it at +1.666 and then meter your shadow. If your shadow is too dark you'll need to grad the highlight somehow. If you want a nice looking transparency you can then check the placement of tones around your image.

WARNING! Velvia 50 has an odd behaviour for it's different colour layers. The yellow layer doesn't go transparent until about +3 or even +3.5. Hence you can get away with a lot more headroom in the areas around the sun on a sunset. Blue is the opposite. A blue sky haze really needs to be placed at +1.5 or even +1.33 as when blues get over exposed they shift to horrible cyan quite quickly and blow out to clear very fast.



p.s. when spot metering shadows you have to realise that when you take a shadow reading you're normally taking it from a textured area and will get an average reading of that area. The actual blackest points of the area may be one or even two stops darker than the average. I tend to walk up to my subject (or an area like it) and actually stick my meter into a shadow - or failing that I make my own shadow on an area. The same goes for highlights - what you read from a distance is a textural average. When you meter it up close the actual highlights of the texture may be a stop brighter.

p.p.s bellows factor works in reverse. If you have a shot with the horizon in the middle and you have a close foreground which you've tilted to get in focus, not only do you need to expose more for the foregroun because of the bellows factor, you also need to expose less for the sky because it's focussed 'past infinity' ("to infinity and beyond!")

But as you say, the shadow detail in Velvia is noisy. I have also noticed this, particularly in scans. It is smoother in Provia, and so you probably wont mind if some interesting parts of the subject is in shade. To me, Velvia 50 was impossible to shoot inside a redwood forest (very contrasty) because both shadows and lights were sometimes lost. Provia was contrasty, but it looked like the real contrast of the subject, i.e. the way it looked to my eyes when I was there. Difficult to get right, but not impossible. I will try Velvia 100 one day, but from my initial tests it seems to be kinda similar to 50 (though maybe a bit better to my eyes)

I would use a spot meter for slides only in those situation where I need to fully exploit the exposure range of the slide film, scenes with high dynamic range or nocturne pictures.

With Fujifilm Astia, now out of production, in nocturne pictures of monuments, often white marble / white travertine monuments (as in my "avatar"), I used to measure with the spot light meter the spot with the "last" highlight where I wanted detail and I opened from 2.3 to 2.7 EV more than what the light meter said (I think I arrived to 3 EV of overexposure for very white subject which would have little texture in any case).

Generally speaking, with subjects that are not exactly white, I think this can be generalised, with modern slide film you can place the highlight at 2.5 EV above the light meter spot reading and maintain good texture.

Velvia is a beast apart and gives less range than most slide film. I would not use it in situations where I find myself using a spot meter.

For normal photographic situations (when you know the exposure range of the film is not going to constitute a problem) I think simple incident light metering is faster and more simple, and always gives very good results.

Velvia actually has quite a few steps into the shadows more than one would suspect. But very little of that is commonly usable. And at the upper end,
trying to eke anything more than a stop and a half out is going to involve jumping though some hoops too. The scanning headache can be discussed on
the appropriate forum. Let's just say it's hard to print everything that you see on a lightbox or thru a slide projector. But chromes as a class are more
finicky than color neg films. Most of us just got used to them and looked for appropriate lighting conditions, on in the studio, modified the light ratios
accordingly. No big deal. Even Aunt Maude managed to do her holiday Kodachrome slide show of her vacation to the Muffler Shop Hall of Fame
in Peoria while her grandchildren squirmed and groaned the whole time. And she just read the tip sheet on the film box.

Drew has a good point. For several years after I got my first camera I avoided slide film due to all the warnings from people "slide film is very difficult, only for people who know what they're doing" etc etc. I was very often disappointed with washed out look of neg film (or rather the way the photo stores printed them), and I actually almost gave up on photography altogether. I never had the time or room to do everything myself.

Then I decided to try slide film, when it was already starting to go out of fashion due to digital cameras, and I decided to do a little bracketing. Holy smokes was I positively surprised when I saw my first slides. I was also more than a little pissed off at people warning me against the use of slide film.