New To 4x5 Photography - Spotmeter Suggestions

Craig - why? Because sheet film is far more expensive than 35mm, you don't always get a second chance under constantly changing light or wind conditions, big view cameras are slower to operate, and one can only carry so many heavy bulky sheet film holders at a time (so bracketing isn't realistic for all the above reasons). At around $50 a cable release punch for 8X10 color sheets plus development at today's prices, just how often do you want to "wing it", shoot-from the-hip exposure-wise? Plus we LF photographers often have much more demanding standards of how we want the prints to come out. A lot of work and expense goes into those too, especially if they're large.

But I put the same demands on my smaller roll film and 35mm exposures too. It's just that I can afford to gamble a little more in terms of a spare or alternate shot in case of a shake in hand-held usage, or a shift in the lighting, or a slight difference in perspective.

Frankly, I don't even believe in any of that, "just rely on the film latitude" nonsense unless it's a low contrast rainy or overcast day, and the film in question is something like Kodak Gold or Delta 3200 designed for a wide range of exposure variability. And then there's the "I can fix anything in Photoshop" crowd; they CAN'T, and that's just how in fact it comes out looking most of the time. So they blame the film or its manufacturer for the mediocre result. For heaven's sake, light meters were invented for a reason.

John Wiegerink said:

Yes, I sure wonder where Ansel pointed his spot meter for Moonrise over Hernandez???

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According to Ansel Adams: "I had a clear visualization of the image I wanted, but when the Wratten No. 15 (G) filter and the film holder were in place, I could not find my Weston exposure meter! The situation was desperate: the low sun was trailing the edge of the clouds in the west, and shadow would soon dim the white crosses. I was at a loss with the subject luminance values, and I confess I was thinking about bracketing several exposures, when I suddenly realized that I knew the luminance of the moon—250 c/ft2. Using the Exposure Formula, I placed this luminance on Zone VII; 60 c/ft2 therefore fell on Zone V, and the exposure with the filter factor o 3x was about 1 second at f/32 with ASA 64 film. I had no idea what the value of the foreground was, but I hoped it barely fell within the exposure scale."

Alan Edward Klein said:

You can get an old micro 4/3 for two hundred or so.

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if you want a spotmeter....why not buy one....we're talking about an advertised price difference of a tank of gas for a pickup truck!

DREW WILEY said:

AA claims he rapidly calculated the luminance of the moon in his head, and used that as his primary reference is able to retain value gradation in the face of the moon. He didn't have time to meter the foreground. (I believe at that time, he was using an SEI spot meter, which of all things, fairly recently came up for sale as a historic "collectible", but only fetched a small price.) So he stipulated water bath development to try to keep the extremes under control; but that also results in rather splotchy streaky values evident in open portions of the sky which became hell when printing. That might be one of the reasons he later intensified the negative, so he could highly print down much of the sky to almost black, preventing most of the anomalies being seen. It also lent more drama to the scene. If one compares the before & after prints the distinction is quite evident. But ironically, the earlier prints, being a lot more scarce, have become the most expensive ones today.

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A few years back, I attended the Association of International Photography Art Dealers [AIPAD], as it's more commonly known, held at the Park Avenue Armory in NYC. There were lots of Ansel Adams B/W prints. Many dealers sell his stuff. I saw three different Sunrise over Hernandez prints. One dealer had his at around $80,000; another at $115,000, and the last at around $140,000.

So I'm standing by the last dealer, the one with the $140,000 edition, when in flows this attention-grabbing couple. He, a rather ordinary fifty-something-year-old but dressed to kill, and she, a knockout blonde about half his age. So I overhear him telling her, "This is nothing. My Hernandez cost me $180,000." As they drifted away, he had a smile on his face. And she, well, I think she was impressed. I was. But not about the $180,000. Or that he had an Adams Hernandez. I was impressed that he had such a hot young girlfriend. Why else would anyone spend $180,000 on an Adams? Even the dealer selling the Hernandez seemed impressed as he winked at me in agreement.

GregY said:

.....Spotmeter "I've been everywhere".... (in this case Santa Fe N.M.)

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TMAX 400 in a Nikon N6006 SLR using matrix or center weighted metering.

DREW WILEY said:

Craig - why? Because sheet film is far more expensive than 35mm, you don't always get a second chance under constantly changing light or wind conditions, big view cameras are slower to operate, and one can only carry so many heavy bulky sheet film holders (so bracketing isn't realistic for all the above reasons). At around $50 a cable release punch for 8X10 color sheets plus development at today's prices, just how often do you want to "wing it", shoot-from the-hip exposure-wise? Plus we LF photographers often have much more demanding standards of how we want the prints to come out. A lot of work and expense goes into those too, especially if they're large.

Frankly, I don't even believe in any of that, "just rely on the film latitude" nonsense unless it's a low contrast rainy or overcast day, and the film in question is something like Kodak Gold or Delta 3200 designed for a wide range of exposure variability. And then there's the "I can fix anything in Photoshop" crowd; they CAN'T, and that's just how in fact it comes out looking most of the time. So they blame the film or its manufacturer for the mediocre result. For heaven's sake, light meters were invented for a reason.

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Also Drew, as we know, it can be more than the $50 shot for the sheet of film, but also the days of walking or $1000s of dollars in flying to the place you're standing (Himalayas, Antarctica, Wind Rivers, Alps or Dolomites......) winging it for the one-time shot isn't an option.....
And yes, I used a spot meter for this 35mm photo.....

Several of the replies here seem to suggest that an incident meter reading must be taken at or near the subject. In my experience that is usually not the case. An incident meter does not meter the subject. It meters the light falling on the subject. The color, brightness, reflectivity, etc, of the subject have nothing to do with the reading. I can often find a nearby proxy location with the same shade from the sun, cloud cover, etc. as the actual subject. Putting the meter there and pointing it in the same orientation it would be in at the actual subject location results in a reading darn close to what I would get if I walked all the way around to the other side of the lake. This seems pretty obvious, but I still tested it at length forty or fifty years ago with my father's Brockway Norwood Director meter.

I do have a Pentax Digital Spot meter but I haven't used it for years. I use a tiny little Gossen Digisix 2, and I use it at least 90% of the time in incident mode.

Alan Edward Klein said:

I was impressed that he had such a hot young girlfriend.

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I'm impressed only if:
1: She turns out to not be just pretty, but also intelligent, loyal and kindhearted.
2: She remained with this guy for any considerable amount of time (as opposed to hopping onto the next cash machine).
3: She would have/did/will remain(ed) with this guy even if his fortunes turn and the material wealth is gone.

Buying the company of a pretty young lady for a while isn't impressive. It's pretty dumb, delusional, and kind of said for all involved if you think about it.

DREW WILEY said:

One issue about using an incident meter is that you can't always be in the right spot to make it work. Being out in ruggedness and the weather isn't like being in a studio. You might need to meter something on the other side of a canyon thousands of feet deep, where the lighting is quite different from where you're standing. One degree spot meters are ideal for that. It's not necessarily about the Zone System at all, although spot meters are great for that application too.

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I find using my hand as a shade works 100% of the time.

You do not need to be next to the subject to use an incident meter, you just need to approximate the light falling at the subject using whatever is handy (pun alert).

It's really not that critical

That says it all, "approximate". And what is "good enough" for one photographer, might be truly deficient for another. I don't know if you have the same saying in Australia as here; but when people would state their results were "good enough for government work", it meant damn sloppy.

When I'm using the word "critical" myself, I'm thinking of the critical care emergency ambulance ward of the hospital, where they're trying to revive the negative with a defibrillator because the exposure was so far off. I'd just walk off, let the morgue deal with the negative, and take a different shot instead, and hope it lives.

Pieter12 said:

According to Ansel Adams...

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Story #2. Perhaps a bit of tall-tale revisionist history. Older self-promoter type photographers tend to do that, as we well know.


The initial publication of Moonrise was at the end of 1942, with a two-page image in U.S. Camera Annual 1943, having been selected by the "photo judge" of U.S. Camera, Edward Steichen. In that publication, Adams gave this account:[6]

It was made after sundown, there was a twilight glow on the distant peaks and clouds. The average light values of the foreground were placed on the "U" of the Weston Master meter; apparently the values of the moon and distant peaks did not lie higher than the "A" of the meter. Some may consider this photograph a "tour de force" but I think of it as a rather normal photograph of a typical New Mexican landscape. Twilight photography is unfortunately neglected; what may be drab and uninteresting by daylight may assume a magnificent quality in the halflight between sunset and dark.

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[6] Maloney, T. J., ed. (1942). U.S. Camera, 1943. New York: Duell, Sloan & Pearce. p. 88-89.

A K 2000 is about the same, a Nikon D 100 can go for around $100 another K100D with lens for less than a 100, only 6.1 MP, but as meter and a exposure check with back screen, not sure if the K100 has a monochrome mode.

I use my K2000 and Sigma SD10, the 8 cell matrix metering does a very good job, and with short zoom the spot is around 1%.

Hi again, Greg. My nephew was just there, guiding about a dozen younger guys in Nepal again. But they all got sick at 18,000 ft due to some kind of food or water issue. Is that Cholatse in the foreground? My nephew climbed that back in his college years when he still lived with me. It looks like the snaking ridge route he took. The pointy summit was about the size of a sheet of typing paper.

Just before he left on this last Nepal trip he was asking me about peaks in the Wind River Range, so he can take the same gang there. I made an extra print of Warbonnet for him a few years ago, to go alongside other mountain pics on his walls, some of which I took on long trips when he accompanied me many years ago. All Sinar 4x5 work back then. In the really tricky spots, it was good to have him along because he was so skilled at tethering me and my camera gear with ropes to some tiny ledge or another.

JerseyDoug said:

Several of the replies here seem to suggest that an incident meter reading must be taken at or near the subject. In my experience that is usually not the case. An incident meter does not meter the subject. It meters the light falling on the subject. The color, brightness, reflectivity, etc, of the subject have nothing to do with the reading. I can often find a nearby proxy location with the same shade from the sun, cloud cover, etc. as the actual subject. Putting the meter there and pointing it in the same orientation it would be in at the actual subject location results in a reading darn close to what I would get if I walked all the way around to the other side of the lake. This seems pretty obvious, but I still tested it at length forty or fifty years ago with my father's Brockway Norwood Director meter.

I do have a Pentax Digital Spot meter but I haven't used it for years. I use a tiny little Gossen Digisix 2, and I use it at least 90% of the time in incident mode.

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Well you're right about the workings of an incident meter & if we were having a discourse about meters in general that would be pertinent. But the OP has one of those and was asking about spotmeters.....sometimes you want to measure the dynamics of the scene and figure out the range from shadows to highlights. There are many places where you won't be able to get a proxy reading of your scene. He'll have 2 meters and can decide what to use.

DREW WILEY said:

Hi again, Greg. My nephew was just there, guiding about a dozen younger guys in Nepal again. But they all got sick at 18,000 ft due to some kind of food or water issue. Is that Cholatse in the foreground? My nephew climbed that back in his college years when he still lived with me. It looks like the snaking ridge route he took. The pointy summit was about the size of a sheet of typing paper.

Just before he left on this last Nepal trip he was asking me about peaks in the Wind River Range, so he can take the same gang there. I made an extra print of Warbonnet for him a few years ago, to go alongside other mountain pics on his walls, some of which I took on long trips when he accompanied me many years ago. All Sinar 4x5 work back then. In the really tricky spots, it was good to have him along because he was so skilled at tethering me and my camera gear with ropes to some tiny ledge or another.

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Nuptse in the foreground.

Lam-Bartll said:

Do you have any suggestions for good resources for learning sensotometry?

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Beyond the Zone System and Kodak's Basic Sensitometry Workbook give a fairly good overview. You don't need to waste time on all the testing exercises to get a reasonable handle on starting points - what you need to know is how to get an understanding of scene contrast, how you want to print that, and then iterate a little from there. Learning how to translate/ transliterate the manufacturers' data sheets will give you a great deal of the baseline knowledge you need, and most of the rest will come from practical application (e.g. some Ilford films can have slightly higher effective shadow speeds than their Kodak equivalents, ignorance of which leads people to make very errant claims about the materials' properties) and learning what you are trying to translate from the scene in front of you into a finished image. Rather quickly, you'll find that you don't need to make film processing an excessively effortful undertaking (0.62 average gradient is a very good compromise for very good scientific reasons), and that there are rather more useful ways of spending your time on image making.

Furthermore, sensitometry is not as difficult as everyone with a spotmeter seems to need you to believe. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that those who spend so much effort defending the Zone System over basic sensitometry are doing so to intentionally obfuscate that they are still stuck on practice exercises because they don't want to admit that applied sensitometry is rather simple and logical stuff, especially in this day and age of much more readily obtainable analytical wherewithal (you have to remember that the Zone System really came about in an era when modern light meters were pretty new bleeding edge tech, and a densitometer was very expensive and rarely found outside of colour and cinema labs) and baseline knowledge - and admitting the aforesaid would force them to confront the reality that they have expended a great deal of effort on something that has not made their work any more interesting to look at (and depends a great deal more than they'd ever dare admit on the latitude for end-user misuse built in by the manufacturer).

JerseyDoug said:

Several of the replies here seem to suggest that an incident meter reading must be taken at or near the subject. In my experience that is usually not the case. An incident meter does not meter the subject. It meters the light falling on the subject. The color, brightness, reflectivity, etc, of the subject have nothing to do with the reading. I can often find a nearby proxy location with the same shade from the sun, cloud cover, etc. as the actual subject. Putting the meter there and pointing it in the same orientation it would be in at the actual subject location results in a reading darn close to what I would get if I walked all the way around to the other side of the lake. This seems pretty obvious, but I still tested it at length forty or fifty years ago with my father's Brockway Norwood Director meter.

I do have a Pentax Digital Spot meter but I haven't used it for years. I use a tiny little Gossen Digisix 2, and I use it at least 90% of the time in incident mode.

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Exactly. No need for pseudoprecision when a little bit of understanding of the way meters and light works will get you a far more accurate result with greater reliability (which is the point of the exercise really).

gbroadbridge said:

I find using my hand as a shade works 100% of the time.

You do not need to be next to the subject to use an incident meter, you just need to approximate the light falling at the subject using whatever is handy

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I'd tend to advocate for using your own shadow, but whatever works, works. Either way they should line up very closely with a competent IRE 1 indexed/ compensated spot reading - which also often demonstrates how routinely errant people are at understanding what to point a spot meter at!

Thanks, Greg. Then that's the Nuptse ridge Alex and Greg Lowe repeatedly attempted back in the late 80's. I met him once and remember his slides. Cholatse is on the next massive ridge to the west, up a different fork in the trail. They were nearly killed in camp when a massive avalanche came down Cho Oyo, clear up over the 1500 ft hill they were camped behind, and nearly clear back down on them where they assumed the would safe from that kind of thing. Everything is big over there, including climbing permits these days.

My nephew shot everything on slides with the little Pentax MX I bought him. He paid for a number of expeditions just through cover and article shots, many of them "accidentally" having the logo of North Face or Sierra Designs somewhere in the frame, on a jacket sleeve or tent fly, for example.

JerseyDoug said:

Several of the replies here seem to suggest that an incident meter reading must be taken at or near the subject. In my experience that is usually not the case. An incident meter does not meter the subject. It meters the light falling on the subject. The color, brightness, reflectivity, etc, of the subject have nothing to do with the reading. I can often find a nearby proxy location with the same shade from the sun, cloud cover, etc. as the actual subject. Putting the meter there and pointing it in the same orientation it would be in at the actual subject location results in a reading darn close to what I would get if I walked all the way around to the other side of the lake. This seems pretty obvious, but I still tested it at length forty or fifty years ago with my father's Brockway Norwood Director meter.

I do have a Pentax Digital Spot meter but I haven't used it for years. I use a tiny little Gossen Digisix 2, and I use it at least 90% of the time in incident mode.

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Phil Davis uses an incident meter in his Beyond the Zone System, he does care about the films ISO or obtain a exposure, that is calculated by the software he developed or uses older Wonder Wheel, what he is looking for is the scene brightness range, zone III and zone VII. For shadow, he just shades the meter with his hand.

DREW WILEY said:

That says it all, "approximate". And what is "good enough" for one photographer, might be truly deficient for another. I don't know if you have the same saying in Australia as here; but when people would state their results were "good enough for government work", it meant damn sloppy.

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Well I've only being doing this photography thing for about 50 years, so what would I know?

I'll admit to going through a spot meter phase back in the 90's though

GregY said:

Often. Buy the Pentax Spotmeter once.....It's a tool you won't regret having
View attachment 396581

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+1 never regretted having one. Alternatively, I'd take the MinoltaF but in the studio, the Gossen Lunastar F2 is irreplaceable to me.

Paul Howell said:

Phil Davis uses an incident meter in his Beyond the Zone System, he does care about the films ISO or obtain a exposure, that is calculated by the software he developed or uses older Wonder Wheel, what he is looking for is the scene brightness range, zone III and zone VII. For shadow, he just shades the meter with his hand.

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Sometimes you're in the valley bottom relatively in shade and your subject is in the sun 1000m+ above you....
you can't replicate the light where it doesn't exist.this is particularly true of sunrise & sunset photographs.... shading w your hand only works if you're in a bright place......

I feel naked without my Sekonic L758DR multispot meter; when out photographing it never leaves me, either on a lanyard or attached to a 'Director's hitch' belt. I'm not a fan of old-style meters that tug at the forelocks of antiquity. The L758DR (or L758D) is the only meter you would need for 4x5. What's better that to see one for sale here on Photrio!


Go for it!

Lam-Bartll said:

Also what are some tips people have for spotmetering a scene? I've owned my 4x5 for about a year now so I'm still learning and I'm happy to hear any tips!

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Keep it sweet 'n simple!

Examine the scene critically with your eyes, and never rush, no matter how tempting.

Ascertain the dark and light areas, but not the brightest (e.g. spectrals) nor the darkest parts (deep shadows).
Spot once or twice on each, locking in memory, then average all.

If desired, the last reading you make locked into memory can be made directly off a grey card held (I have a grey card the size of a credit card in a plastic slip attached to my lanyard) in front of the meter at arm's length (ideally in the same light as the subject, but in the landscape genre, this isn't always possible). That grey card can be extra assurance in case the averaged result is out of whack — particularly when using slide film with a much narrower latitude than negative film.

Modern electronic meters like the L758D (and others) have a few provisions to change baseline metrics e.g. of how the meter reads and 'ups' or 'downs' a values from standard. I deliberately meter with one of/either +0.5 or +2/3 overexposure to cater for the loss during the scan and print-step (particularly the print-step). This of course all depends on experience and what you consider to be right in the end.

GregY said:

Sometimes you're in the valley bottom relatively in shade and your subject is in the sun 1000m+ above you....
you can't replicate the light where it doesn't exist.this is particularly true of sunrise & sunset photographs.... shading w your hand only works if you're in a bright place......

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Had not thought of this, I need to take a look at Davis's book to see how he address this, just a matter of curiosity, at this point I am just too lazy to learn a new system.

BrianShaw said:

It may be worth noting that landscape photography was successfully accomplished prior to the advent of the Zone System and spot meters.

There are many ways to the same end.

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Indeed, and agreed about the many ways to the same end. That said, it also might be worth noting that once spot meters appeared, pretty much all the masters moved to using them and never looked back.

Also, people mentioned in the thread that they attended classes where "only the instructor" had a spot meter - that perfectly proves my point, since in my experience (after running nearly 100 photography workshops) normally one goes to a Workshop to learn from the instructor not just about the art and craft of photography, but also to see what gear the instructor uses and why.

Again, there are many ways to the same end, but normally people doing this for a living and becoming masters of their craft, in the process of getting there also aimed - and likely succeeded - at finding the easier, better, most efficient, most powerful way to do things.

Also, as mentioned in my previous post, people doing this for a living and being out there photographing every day of the year tend to find themselves in hundreds of different light and subject situations, many more than someone going out there a day or two every month or so. In turn, while it's great to hear people offering suggestions about what works for them, not knowing how much they are out photographing, what subject they photograph, in what weather, and so on, and not knowing their results, makes their recommendations hardly universal - looking at a master's portfolio will give one a much better idea about what subject and light they faced, which in turn gives one a much better idea whether the tools they are using would work for us as well.

Something worth considering when choosing our own tools, that's all I am saying.

Best regards,

Vieri