Metering

[Poisson Du Jour]

A spot meter is more generally useful than incident, especially in the landscape context. An incident reading will not take into account the variety of luminance across the scene -- essentially, it is a "blanket" assumption that the scene has constant tonality, when this is most unlikely.

 

[John Koehrer]

B&W, colour neg, colour slide, ortho, IR, need I go on?

Still, familiarity with your equipment covers it. etc. etc. etc.
IE: The meter doesn't care but the fuzzygrapher does.

 

[Xmas]

It is virtually impossible to answer this question without knowing the type of film you are using.

True but but like saying shant:

- if we take mono pan and selenium photo cell then
you can take a near by reflected reading of dark material like tree bark in open shade and treat that as a zone1 reading of similar areas further away
( you would need a meter with a zone1 datum on the calculator)

 

[ME Super]

I've had good luck with metering off of the palm of my hand (which doesn't change color with the seasons like the back of my hand) and adding one stop exposure. This has worked for me with color slide and color negative film. For B&W infrared, I usually do a sunny f/4 with the IR filter that I have, because when I shoot infrared, its usually a sunny day.

 

[lxdude]

I've had good luck with metering off of the palm of my hand (which doesn't change color with the seasons like the back of my hand) and adding one stop exposure. This has worked for me with color slide and color negative film.

Me too. It consistently matches a reading off a gray card. It always gave me excellent results with transparency film, so long as I had access to the same light as the highlights.

 

[wiltw]

I've had good luck with metering off of the palm of my hand (which doesn't change color with the seasons like the back of my hand) and adding one stop exposure. This has worked for me with color slide and color negative film. For B&W infrared, I usually do a sunny f/4 with the IR filter that I have, because when I shoot infrared, its usually a sunny day.

Me too. It consistently matches a reading off a gray card. It always gave me excellent results with transparency film, so long as I had access to the same light as the highlights.

The palm of the hand seldom will 'match a reading off a gray card'...it is about +1EV compared to a gray card regardless of racial background. And in Jan 2012, in writing a post about palm metering on APUG, I had metered my own palm with a Minolta F 1degree spotmeter and found it to be +1.5EV brighter than the gray card! Doing it just now, I find the difference to be only +1.1EV -- so it does change, simply not as much as the back of the hand which tans...four months ago my wife will tell you I was very darkly tanned after vacationing at Lake Powell.

Back on the topic of which meter, I find a spotmeter allows me to assess the range of brightness in a scene and know how well or how poorly it fits within the range of the type of film I am shooting, it allows me to also precisely 'place' certain tones within the scene where I want them to fall. An incident meter does neither of those things, it only tells me the center of the exposure and I have to HOPE that all the tones in the scene will fit properly...a higher probability of happening with B&W, a lower probability of happening with color transparency film.

I urge all folks to 'calibrate' their own palm against a known 18% card to know precisely the difference in brightness. Using the palm -- not using the back of hand -- has been known for decades as the more reliable technique.

 

[lxdude]

The palm of the hand seldom will 'match a reading off a gray card'...it is about +1EV compared to a gray card regardless of racial background. .

Right. As to matching a gray card, I was referring to the technique of reading and increasing exposure one stop.