Re: [Leica] spot meters (and others)

[Jim Brick <jim@brick.org>]

The reason I bought my first R camera (R3 in 1976) was because it had a
SPOT meter as well as an averaging meter mode. A spot meter is very helpful
in any tough lighting situation. For landscapes, typically an incident
meter works best, unless you want to shift the subject density values
somewhere other than where they visually appear. Film EI is based on 18%
gray. When evaluating a colorful scene, it's quite often neither obvious
where 18% gray lies nor at what density each color will be reproduced. An
incident meter takes that judgement away and makes life easy. For B&W film,
a good spot meter is far more useful. You can make sure you have enough
exposure to carry the shadow detail. But this can be fatal on transparency
film. It's too easy to blow out the highlights which basically ruins your
transparency. Since negative film is the opposite, you need to expose
enough to register detail in the dark areas. If the dynamic range of the
scene is too great, you can compress it in development. You can do this
with transparency film, but the results are far less useful.

Different types of photography, the intended goal, and what you expect,
will all go into determining how you meter a particular subject and scene.
All three metering methods are of equal importance and should be understood
for their virtues. A spot meter is definitely not used just for non-mobile
subjects. If I could own just one meter, it would indeed be a spot meter
because you can, with a little work, get all of the information necessary
to photograph anything. Fortunately, I own several types and use them equally.

Jim

At 07:33 AM 7/9/98 -0700, TM <spaniel@pacbell.net> wrote:

>Do any of you LUG members use a spot meter often? On page 42 of the new,
>August issue of Popular Photography, there is an article about
>Washington state photographer Bill Slack wherein he states his love for
>the Pentax Digital Spotmeter. However, he essentially shoots only
>landscapes and that brings to mind a thought: Are spot meters only good
>for non-mobile subjects like landscapes, which give one time to analyze
>the data issued by the meter?
>