[Leica] More on Metering

[Mike Johnston <70007.3477@compuserve.com>]

Mind you, I'm not saying there's anything wrong with trusting the cyborg to do
your metering for you. A Canon EOS-1n can (demonstrably!) meter better and
faster more often than I can. I'm just pointing out that multi-segment metering
isn't a tool that is at your service--it is an automatic feature that is taking
over for you. 

I had a very interesting experience once of photographing without any meter at
all for six months. I photographed every day and got quite good at evaluating
light. Better, I got very good at compensating for situations that would have
fooled _any_ automatic metering (example: slender sunlit tree branches against
a darkly shadowed background. I could show you the picture). There's more: to
my surprise, the sense of control and confidence that I acquired during this
period were pretty amazing. I came to really trust myself, and to understand
exactly how to expose in some very difficult situations. 

Ay, but there's the rub:
There are two "rubs," unfortunately. One is that, once I got a meter again (in
an M6, as it happens) I found I couldn't ignore it. That one little red delta
lit up was like a scold! I lost my "inner sense" of how to meter and simply
used the M6 meter as it was intended, semi-spot-metering unproblematic areas of
the scene and setting the camera accordingly. The other difficulty is that you
must be shooting often and lots in order to keep your eye "tuned." I don't
believe that shooting without a meter is something you can do when you shoot
twice or three times a week for only an hour or two at a time, as I do now. (I
recently tried my old trick with an M4 and wasn't able to carry it off.)

But I still mistrust AE meters, no matter how sophisticated they are. Take an
evening scene with shadowed foreground and a bright sky. There is one best
exposure for any film for such a scene. Take your centerweighted or
multi-segment evaluative AE camera and point it so that the sky fills 2/3rds of
the frame. Meter. Now gently lower the camera just a bit so that the shadowed
ground now fills 2/3rds of the frame. Meter.

Those two readings will never agree--not with a Nikon, not with a Canon, not
with a Leica R8. 

Maybe fancy cyborg meters will work more quickly and give you better results
more often than any other way of working could do; I certainly don't argue with
anyone who has decided to go that route. But there is still something to be
lost for these gains.

- --Mike

P.S. One of Phil Davis's comments--I paraphrase--'Any metering method not based
on a shadow reading is only an estimate.'