We often write about cameras from various decades, or write about our experiences with different film emulsions. Rarely do we write about exposure or more accurately, metering.
I suspect that this is for a few reasons, but mainly how interested are you in the “science of photography” or put another way, are you more interested in the content or the technique? Rather like the Zone System photographers themselves might be allocated a zone – Zone 1 being “What is a meter”? – Zone 10 being “I have a spot meter, use the zone system and always place my shadows in Zone 3”! I’ll “put my cards on the table” and say, I’d fall in about Zone 6. Yes I want to get a good exposure and develop the film well, but I’m also interested in the content and sometimes click first and ask questions later! That brings another element into play – time. If you are making a landscape image with an 8×10 and it’s taken you 10 minutes to set up, you want the sun to “move around” just a bit more, and are waiting for 10 minutes, then you have no excuse and plenty of time, to take multiple readings, and consider your exposure fully. Apply all your knowledge and experience before you press the button. If you are using 35mm and making street photo’s that simply won’t work. You’d have to start applying your knowledge in a different way, perhaps take a shadow reading, close down a bit if it gets brighter, and open up a bit if you move into the shadows. F8 and be there springs to mind at this point. This is quite often the way I work.
Typically I’ll start by taking a reflective reading of some grass. Grass in sun is, give or take, about zone 5. Then I’ll take an incident light reading, often they are, and perhaps should be, the same. An average of the two is a pretty good base. If there is a bit of shade about, I’ll wander to it and repeat. That’s often a couple stops less bright. Translated into the zone system, if the grass in sun is zone 5 – (lets say f8 at 200iso), then if two stops darker, the shadows will therefore fall in zone 3 – that’s about right. To a degree, in a general view, the highlights will look after themselves – or one can develop the film for the highlights!
I’ll set the lens and off I go! If my whole image is in the shade, then I’ll open up a stop or two, thus my zone 3 becomes my new zone 5. No need to meter again. Likewise if I’m making an image in the full sun, I may well close down a stop to help keep better highlight detail. Unless the sun goes in or the weather, and therefore the light changes dramatically, no need to meter again. I wander about and make my photo’s.
Of course these days we have modern film that has a good wide exposure latitude. Especially FP4, Gold 200 etc. Slide film is more fussy and likes to be “correctly” exposed! Then we can develop for the highlights, we can also choose Stand/Semi-Stand or Minimal Agitation development, this too will help even exposure out.
Really, with film latitude, a decent film development technique, a little knowledge and practice of exposure, we should all get good negatives every time. As we all know however there is always a curveball to throw us out, that’s when I go back to the meter!
I’ve owned a Sekonic L308-s meter for decades. Technically it’s my second. I sold my first one, almost immediately regretted it, so when a colleague was selling hers, I purchased it from her without hesitation. It has a range of ISO from 3 to 8000, I’m unlikely to need anything else, in fact mine normally lives on 100 iso. It will offer an f stop from f1.4 up to f90.9! It will display the result with either 3rd or half stop increments depending on your lens, and has an accuracy down to 1/10th of a stop. It will do reflective or incident readings – I need nothing more!
They come with a slip case and a lanyard, take a single AA battery. Mine has had a lithium battery in for at least 5 years, and shows no sign of needing replacement! True I have cameras that don’t have light meters in them, so I kind of need one, but I think even if I were shooting with an auto-everything digital, I’d still keep a meter handy!
What meter do you use? Do you own a meter? Do you get perfectly good results that please you using “sunny 16” and think everything I’ve just written in bonkers??
S.H.O.U.T. 
I have an old Gossen Luna Pro Digital, only really use it with medium format manual cameras. With 35mm I let the camera do the metering and adjust if needed. Having said that I’ve had some really good results with sunny 16.
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Hi! I trust the meter in the Canon EOS30 I have to get on with it, most of the other cameras I tend to set myself, in the way described, although sometimes – sunny 16 is good enough!! 🙂 – Cheers Andy
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I have an L308-s too. I also have a Sekonic L208 Twinmate, but haven’t used it in some time (the 308 is better featured, if larger). I’ll fall back on a light meter app on my phone if without a dedicated meter (the app I use has a zoom feature which can be useful if I’m trying to match a reflective reading with the field of view of my lens).
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… my phone takes so long to boot up it would have gotten dark by the time it was ready! 🙂 lol
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I invested very many hours over many years trying to get to grips with the zone system. There was always something nagging away at the back of my mind that it wasn’t quite… right. It seemed to be an attempt to quantify and control, scientifically, something that contained a lot of subjective judgements. I often got a flea in my ear on sites such as ‘APUG’ with the usual “You are constrained by the laws of sensitometry, whether you like it or not!” or some such that had probably come out of an Ansel Adams technical book.
One of the things that bugged me was, say, taking a picture of a mountain. You can meter a shadow that takes up 20 % of your frame, sure enough, but the shadows in a mountain 2 miles away? With a light meter with a 1% angle of measurement? It is just going the average everything in the circle, surely? I found I got better results by just looking at the scene and using some common sense. Is it high contrast? Maybe pull the development a bit. Flat as a pancake? Maybe give it a bit of a push?
In my day job I worked for 30 years in digital imagery – not pictorial photographs, though, it was medical imagery for diagnostic purposes. We used Sekonic spot meters to calibrate equipment very accurately – and here’s the thing. We scooped out the electronics and scrapped them, because they were too dependent on temperature, battery voltage and random component fluctuations. Instead we used our own electronics with stabilised voltages and high quality op amps, just keeping the sensor. We then used a method of centering the meter to find the middle of the sensor – because it was almost never accurately lined up with the scribed circle on the screen… (Almost never). Finally, we used a table of colour correction factors – because the response of the meter was not linear across the colour spectrum – and the difference wasn’t trivial. This isn’t a criticism of the Sekonic meter, it was one of the best, that is why we used it. Yet, I have never seen in any discussion by ‘zonies’ who seem to believe that they are able to pin down exposure to some exact value, any discussion of aligning the meter with the circle on the screen or compensating for different colours – or getting the meter calibrated.
I always thought my late Father, who was a very keen but remarkably lax photographer, had it right when I asked him about exposure. He would shrug and say “Well, what’s one stop, one way or the other?”
Personally, I own several meters including a spot meter, but usually use Sunny 16 and a bit of experience, but of course the human eye compensates for dim light – so at the end of the day as the light starts to fail, it doesn’t really work. I used to carry a traditional meter all the time, but to be honest some of the iPhone apps seem to work pretty well so that is what I’d be using near the end of the day or in subdued light.
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Hello! I agree. I think perhaps the biggest achievement of the Zone system is that it makes the user think about exposure, what shadows are there, what highlights there are, where they are within the frame, and to come to some sort of conclusion as to why a given exposure is set. Of course anyone can do that without the need of the Zone system.
The colour question you mention is of course another issue all together. I used to know a scenic photographer, who’s work was often used for postcards. Apart from complaining that they’d often replace his skies with a stock blue one (!) he was always keen to say, if it’s green, open up another stop! I once worked in a lab and have used a densitometer and kodak test strips – luckily, rather like my school algebra I’ve forgotten all that!!!
With regard to calibration. My understanding is that a specific developer, matched with a specific film, and meter, is calibrated to find the “true” ISO of the film combo, by finding the first glimmer of shadow detail just discernible from true black, the the same for highlights, just off paper white. There are of course two issues with that. 1 that’s a darkroom printing process, and if you are a scanner guy rather than darkroom printer, that’s useless. 2 As soon as any of those trinity of meter/film and developer is changed, you start again! Then add in the fact that “thinner” negatives are better for scanning, and indeed produce less grain prints. Things very quickly dissolve into, my often used method, of opening and closing having taken one reading at the start of the day – sort of an educated Sunny 16! Or indeed what your father knew or “F8 and be there” !! Cheers Andy
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