Re: MR4 meters

["Charles E. Love, Jr." <cel14@cornell.edu>]

At 12:52 PM 8/10/96 -0500, you wrote:

{snip}

>That a reflected light meter works for anyone at all is a testimonial to
>film latitude (and the diligent work by a few dedicated photographers
>who really study a scene and try to find something that seems to be 18%
>reflective, or use of a gray card). The 5 stops or so latitude in color
>negative and b/w film saves the day for reflected light meters. Color
>slides are seldom right-on with such readings. (And I can already hear
>the incoming replies, <Oh, but mine are>.) They simply cannot be.
>the deep woods. Look at the reflected light results. Do the same
>with an incident light meter and look at the skin tones.
>
{snip}

>I offer this conclusion. If you have and love the beautiful little Leica
>meters, by all means use them. But if you want truly accurate exposure
>readings for all films, use an incident light meter. But also remember,
>incident meters also vary because of the things mentioned in the first
>paragraph. Test a few to get one that seems to be reading accurately. 
>
>Fred Ward
>

I don't suppose I should get into another one of these endless metering
discussions (there was just one on the Medium Format Digest that went on
forever, and I restrained myself), but several people have said things like
this, and it's just silly.  

When this post attacks reflected light metering, it assumes mindless use of
an averaging meter in all cases.  With narrow latitude slide film, it's true
that mindless use of an averaging meter won't work in all cases.  But
neither will mindless use of an incident meter.  If you are exposing narrow
latitude slide film and want accurate exposures, the best way is to meter a
highlight with a reflected light spot meter (with slide film, you must
expose for the highlights--it cannot stand to be overexposed).  But then, of
course, you must use judgment--if your highlight is not equivalent to a gray
card, then you must compensate for that, by opening up some for lighter
things, closing down for darker ones.   A few minutes with a zone system
text will give you the idea--it's much simpler with color slides than B&W.
Anyway, the point is that the incident meter will not give the corrrect
exposure either, for narrow latitude film in tough cases.  Indeed, the
incident meter will agree with the averaging reflected light meter in the
easy cases, and will be just as wrong in the hard ones.  (Example: you will,
contrary to the post, NOT get correct results with different skin tones by
just taking an incident reading.  You must close down a bit for very light
skin, open up for dark--just as with a refected light meter.)

Common sense ought to tell you all this--after all, the great landscape
photographers from Adams to the present use a variant of this reflected
light spot system, not incident meters (attend a good workshop if you doubt
this).  Of course they use medium or large format  cameras, mostly (I
suppose Galen Rowell is an exception).

So what's a Leicaphile to do?  After all, Leicas are designed for quick
shooting.  If you are using narrow-latitude slide film, it's easy with an
R-camera.  If you have a hard case, with widely varing values in the scene,
don't use the averaging meter, use the spot meter on a highlight (e.g.,
where there's light and shadows, use something in the brightest light).  If
there's something in the scene that approximates a gray card, use it--and
then (on the automatic ones) hold down the shutter button part way and
recompose and shoot.  I've done it this way for years, and it's very quick.
Of course, photographer's judgement enters when you cannot find a spot equal
to a gray card, but then that's what we do, isn't it?--and incident light
meters require even more judgement in this case.

I find the M-cameras much less good with slide film, because they make all
this harder.  The MR-type meters meter the area covered by a 90 mm. lens,
which gives a semi-spot effect on the wide-angles, but averaging on the
teles.  It's usable--you can remind yourself of the area covered by using
the preview lever to show the 90 mm. frameline--but slow, and you have to
remember all this under pressure.  The M5 spot is excellent, but there you
do want averaging too, for the easy cases, since it's easy to make an error
with spot only if you are in a hurry (same problem with the SL and SL2,
BTW).  The M6 meter is somewhat selective, but covers too big an area for my
taste.  I cannot imagine why the M6 has never adopted the spot-averaging
choice like the one on the R6--it would make things much better for us slide
shooters.  Maybe with all this new Leica R&D money....