Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 1996/04/19
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]Hello all, I'll take a crack at this too, although I apologize if this has already been covered in too much detail. I receive this list as a digest and am sometimes a little behind the curve... Eastland's _M Compendium_, which I think is otherwise an excellent book, contains a serious error in its discussion of M6 metering. He says that changing the framelines will actually change the area metered, which of course isn't true, since what is metered is always the area of the 12mm white spot on the shutter curtain. What changes on an M6 is the size of the area _in the viewfinder_ which is metered, and this depends on the focal length of the lens used. A 35mm lens will allow a larger portion of what is in the viewfinder to be metered than, say, a 90mm lens, even though in both cases the white spot covers the same 13% (or whatever the actual percentage is) circle in the center of the frame. In practice, if you are metering a black cat ten feet away from you in the snow, the cat will fill a smaller percentage of the area metered with a 35mm lens than with a 90mm lens. And you'd better think about compensating either way! By changing to framelines that are 50% higher (50 for 35, 75 for 50, etc.) you get a simply get a rough approximation of the part of the image that is being metered. Or does this confuse things even more? Tom Knoles tgk@mwa.org