Re: Measuring exposure with Leica M6

["Jeff Segawa" <segawa@netone.com>]

>I would really appreciate to hear everybody=B4s experience in
metering with
>the M6. I am particularily interested in hearing about practical
situations
>and variation of systems (camera meter, incident light meter, etc..).

First of all, it helps to know exactly what you're metering: Do you
have a good feel for your camera's meter sensitivity pattern as it
relates to what you're seeing in the viewfinder? Far from being
ambiguous, it should be fairly easy to determine and more or less
constant. I imagine that it changes along with your lenses, but in any
case, it should always fill the particular set of framelines about the
same way.

But yes, it's a pretty large area! The best I can suggest is to try to
meter from areas which are either close to 18% reflectance, or a mix
of highlights and shadows which come somewhat close. The trick of
metering off your hand or grass certainly can be helpful too.

I own both an incident and a spot meter. I mostly use the spot meter,
in combination with the Zone System, because I find the combo to be
especially powerful in helping me to capture on film, the image that I
had previsualized, and it gives me the info I need to "compress it
down" to fit onto my film, whereas the incident meter merely attempts
to capture a scene as it appears, with a minimum of effort or
thinking. For distant objects, it can be a rather inprecise tool,
though a fast one, and in combination with lots of bracketing, it can
yield good results. I do not much care for this brute-force approach,
however.
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