How to examine how well my old Rolleiflex is metering/exposing?

I have a Rolleiflex 3.5F with a working meter. At least, it reacts to light - I don't know how accurate it is. I also don't know how accurate the shutter timings are. I shoot Fuji/Kodak "professional" colour negative film, and I go by the meter's suggestions when setting exposure. I'm generally satisfied with the exposure of my photos, certainly in bright daylight. But I've noticed recently that the meter's readings don't really match the "Sunny-16" rule or the exposure settings that my phone chooses whenever I take a digital photo alongside a Rolleiflex photo.

 

I'm wondering if I can "do better" with regards to exposure. Who knows - maybe my lab are "correcting" exposure when they scan my film, which I always have them do. I'm not always sure if some photo couldn't maybe look even better if it had been exposed differently.

 

Is there some methodical way to examine how well the camera is metering/exposing, given that I don't know how accurate the meter and shutter actually are? Or some way of determining what exposure adjustments (if any) I should make in certain/all situations?

 

There are a lot of variables and unknown quantities here Colin. A degree of under or over exposure will certainly be corrected for during scanning. Better to look at the negatives, although colour negatives are funny looking things which take some practice to assess correctly. Or run a transparency film through, which has much less exposure tolerance than negative film.

 

I've got a 3.5F which I don't use nearly enough. The meter responds strongly to light but I've never really trusted it, preferring to use a hand held meter. Selenium meters may or may not change in response over time. Having said that I just checked it against my Polaris digital meter, in cloudy bright conditions, and it was within half a stop. But that's just at one level of lighting.

 

I'd rather trust the shutter speeds, I've never had any reason to doubt that mine are reasonably accurate.

 

The bottom line is that you need to be sure that your measurement of exposure is correct. Everything else follows. I've never regretted buying a modern digital meter which I can fully trust. When you think about how much film and processing cost, and how much time and effort you put into taking the pictures, it's false economy not to nail the exposure.

It's not "digital", but my favorite hand-held meter is the Gossen LunaPro SBC (takes standard 9-volt battery).

Do you have another working meter or DSLR that you can compare it to? That would be the quickest way to test the meter. As for shutter speeds, if you haven't had the shutter serviced in a long time I wouldn't be surprised if the speeds are slower than the marked speeds. As many others have noted in a lot of posts on this site, older selenium cell meters are not always paragons of accuracy. Some hold up better than others (I have two Zeiss Ikophots from the 1950's that are quite accurate in decent light) but they were never that great in lower light levels even new out of the box when they were made. The image you posted looks like it might be underexposed in the camera and tweeked a bit in scanning, but without seeing the negative I wouldn't want to state that unequivocally.