[Leica] Incident vs. Reflective Metering

["Dave Olson" <ckrosebud@hotmail.com>]

Just read with interest the comments on relfective versus incident light 
reading/metering. Having been a long time believer in hand held meters I 
just would like to throw my experiences into the pot.
For starters, if you have never tried or are skeptical of the value of 
incident  vs reflective, try this. Beg or borrow a decent *calibrated* hand 
held meter. Arm your self with your camera with its built-in reflective 
meter. Go out and photograph a number of different color and substance 
items; dark wood, shiny metal, you get the idea. Expose two shots, one with 
the in camera meter and then the incident meter, pointed toward the camera 
in the same spot as the subject. Now the beauty of incident metering is you 
don't have to be in the exact same spot. Just a location that has the same 
amount of light falling on the location as the subject. Experiment number 2; 
take a reading from both the subject's location and a separate location. 
This would be done assuming you could not get close to the intended subject. 
Compare the readings. They will be the same. To address the issue of the 
black cat and the white on white dress or the sands at White Sands National 
Monument. An incident meter reading will give an accurate exposure, leaving 
the cat black and the dress white and White Sands (not really sand) a 
rendition of what you saw. Would you bracket? Maybe. Remember the basic rule 
of all built-in reflective meters, they're calibrated to 18% greyscale, like 
a greyscale card. Black will be grey, snow will be grey, a white dress will 
be grey. The main thing is experiment and see for yourself the difference in 
reading variations, shooting the same subject. I have 3 hand helds, and use 
them no matter what system I'm shooting that day; EOS, 3s, EOS 1N RS, Nikon 
FE, Leica M6s TTL or my Pentax 67s even though they have TTL prisms (for 
macro work)and my Yashica Mat 124 when I want to shoot square. If you don't 
have a hand held, at least get a small grey card to carry and meter off of 
that in difficult situations.
I shoot almost exclusively chromes and they leave little room for metering 
error.    Dave





_________________________________________________________________
Tired of spam? Get advanced junk mail protection with MSN 8. 
http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail

- --
To unsubscribe, see http://mejac.palo-alto.ca.us/leica-users/unsub.html