Learning spotmetering

[darcy_cote]

Hi there;

 

I am looking for good websites/webpages that help to learn good spotmetering.

 

Thanks!

[roger_hicks1]

Dear Darcy,

 

There's not much to learn: I assume you're talking about neg (for tranny, use an incident light meter).

 

Set the full ISO speed on the meter.

 

Meter the darkest area in which you want texture and detail.

 

Use the shadow index, if the meter has one; or I.R.E. 1, if the meter has an I.R.E. scale; or give 3 stops less than the main index shows.

 

If you have enough texture and detail on your neg as a result, all well and good. If you don't, then start to drop the ISO speed setting in 1/3 stop steps until you do or (if you are aiming off from the main index) drop to 2-2/3 or 2-1/2 or 2-1/3 stops below.

 

Incidentally, I'm glad you got your 617 built.

 

Cheers,

 

Roger (www.rogerandfrances.com)

[rick_jones5]

I have never seen anything in writing that explains much more than what Roger has laid out. The biggest problem for me has been to learn (still learning incidently) where to aim the meter and how to adjust the indicated exposure. Just what is the darkest area where you want texture and detail? If you pick an area that is too dark you are likely to overexpose. While Roger wrote about metering a shadow area there are many times you would be advised to meter a highlight as in a portrait. Once you understand how a reflected meter works (Fred Picker's "Zone VI Workshop" gives a good explanation) it becomes a matter of experience. Certainly, in the beginning, detailed notes on just what you metered and what adjustments you made can be a big help - as long as you take the time to carefully analyze the resulting negatives and prints. Spot metering requires some important decision making and sometimes I believe that's one reason why so many incident meters are sold.

[brian_ellis16]

Good answers but no mention of metering the brightest highlight in which you want texture or detail after metering and placing the darkest important shadow area? I do both. For a "normal" scene and "normal" desired print I usually place the darkest important shadow area on Zone IV (one stop down from whatever meter reading you get for that area). I found that using Zone III (two stops down), the usual recommendation, resulted in negatives that were too thin and I was unwilling to accept a lower EI than I was already using (200 for HP5+ and 64 for TMax 100). Then I meter the brightest important highlight (i.e. the brightest highlight in which I want detail or texture). If it's higher than VIII (three stops up from whatever reading the meter gives you) then the negative will be given minus development. If it's lower than I'd like (i.e. if normal development would produce a print having insufficient contrast) then the negative gets plus development.

 

I think that to use a spot meter to best advantage it's necessary to understand the zone system even if you don't actually use it. Understanding the zone system gives you an understanding of how your materials work and enables you to make the kind of knowledgeable and creative decisions most large format photographers wish to make for themselves. The zone system is very easy to understand, an hour or two of reading will do it (the testing required to actually use it is another matter but just understanding it isn't time-consuming). Fred Picker's book that someone else mentioned gives an excellent, short, easy-to-understand explanation of the zone system as I recall.

[john_layton]

I usually place my important shadows on a "high 3" - and if my important highlights read

above a high 7, I might cut my development time just a bit. I usually find myself adjusting

most ISO's to a lower number than "normal." My goal is to generally get a negative with as

much info as possible as a good starting point - then further interpreting its particular

"character" to reflect what I felt as I was taking the photograph.

 

As for interpreting contrast ranges in the field, even with my 1 degree spotmeter, I almost

always find that there are micro-densities that invariably push the contrast a bit higher

than the meter indicates. Also, to the extent that I tend to do quite a few exposures

longer than one second, I find the "pulling apart" of contrast zones due to reciprocity

failure can actually be of great benifit and therefore often don't incorporate the

"compensation" thats often recommended to accomodate reciprocity failure. My advice is

to get out there with your camera and shoot some film before doing too much reading -

and have fun - its an amazing and endless journey!

[ryan_mcintosh]

My best suggestion is to pick up a Ansel Adams good like The Negative, and read about The Zone System. That is all you need to know, plus more.

 

Ryan McIntosh

www.RyanMcIntosh.net

[scott___1]

darcy... try this site:

 

http://www.cicada.com/pub/photo/zs/

 

should go a long way to geting you started!

[roger_hicks1]

The reason I made no mention of the Zone System is that I advise people to avoid it as far as possible. The naming of Zones is a work of genius: the rest is a confusing pseudo-simplification of basic sensitometry, and is of extremely limited use if you own a spot meter and have any idea of how to use it.

 

Brian is dead right that it helps to understand the Zone System, even if you don't use it, but purely personally I find real sensitometry a lot easier to understand: I had to unlearn a lot of Zonespeak before I could fully appreciate basic sensitometry. I'd learn sensitometry BEFORE the Zone System (if you choose to learn the latter at all) rather than vice versa.

 

It is very, very hard to over-expose a mono negative to the point of unusability: an extra stop or two means reduced sharpness, bigger grain and a change in tonality that most people have no problem with. You can forget about 'blowing' the highlights if you are shooting something like Ilford FP4 Plus. Under-exposure is much easier!

 

Yes, for portraits it often makes sense to meter a skin tone. Use the mid-point index on the meter and give 1/2 to 1 more stop (experience will soon tell you which works better) or use I.R.E. 4 or thereabouts. No Zone System needed.

 

To fit a given subject brightness range onto the required negative density range requires a knowledge of the subject brightness range (easily measured with a spot meter); lens flare (1.2 is a good working approximation as a starting point); and the requisite negative density range (typically around 1.2, allowing for enlarger flare). With a time-gamma curve -- from the film or developer manufacturers, or not hard to determine for yourself -- you now know the approximate appropriate development time. Again, no Zone System needed.

 

Such terms as log brightness and density ranges and gamma may be hard and unfamiliar for Zone System devotees but learning the basic vocabulary of real sensitometry is arguably a lot easier than learning Zone System jargon. Also, I certainly found it quicker, easier and more meaningful to plot even multiple D/log E curves than to shoot grey cards in Zone System sequences.

 

The biggest fault in the Zone System as it is widely circulated (especially in books other than Adams's own) is that it encourages people to look for more consistency and repeatibility than exists in the real world. Very few people who understand a reasonable amount of basic sensitometry are happy with the Zone System, though rather more are happier with Beyond The Zone System.

 

A good, rough idea of how a spot meter works, plus taking lots of pictures, is more use than all the Zone System posturing and grey-card shooting in the world.

 

Take a look at some of the free modules in Photo School in www.rogerandfrances.com -- including 'Why we do not use the Zone System' -- for a further exposition of some of these ideas.

 

If you disagree with me and are happy with the Zone System, fine, but if you find it confusing and of dubious value, you are not alone. Do not let anyone pretend intellectual superiority for understanding (or pretending to understand) how the Zone System works. This is not a matter of intelligence: it is a matter of how your mind works. There are other ways of doing things and some of them are arguably better.

 

Cheers,

 

Roger

[brian_ellis16]

I spent massive amounts of time reading and understanding "Beyond The Zone System" and attending two of Phil Davis' workshops. I was a real devotee for about five years, did all the testing, carried my pocket computer around, used it for every photograph, bought graph paper, did some plotting of graphs by hand, then bought Phil's Plotter and Matcher programs, learned and used them, the whole bit. Then it began to dawn on me that (a) with all of that I still got the occasional negative that was too dense or too thin, and (b) I was spending a lot of time and effort trying to achieve a degree of precision that was (IMHO) neither attainable nor necessary. So I canned the pocket computer and went back to what to me is a very simple approach - meter and place the shadows, meter and place the highlights, develop accordingly. That's basic Zone System 101 I suppose but I really don't think you need more than that for black and white photography. IIRC Fred Picker advocated an even simpleer system - place the important highlight on Zone VII and shoot. Then there's Edward Weston and lots of others in the 1930s and before who didn't even use a meter.

[daniel_jolicoeur]

"darcy... try this site:

http://www.cicada.com/pub/photo/zs/

 

should go a long way to geting you started!"

 

I'll secound that that site also!

Regards,

Dan

[darcy_cote]

I guess I should say that I primarily use transparency film so I am working with the 5

stops.

Darcy One thing that I find that at times I find difficult is that the spot meter adjusts

everything to 18 percent gray so a white object to expose for properly you have to open

up two stops from the reading and opposite for dark objects.

[don_wong2]

For color transparency film, conventional wisdom says that highlights lose their detail at

2.3 stops above normal (normal is 0), shadows at 2.7 stops below 0.

 

The Minolta F has incorporated those values into their shadow and highlight buttons. To

use the shadow button, read a subject, then press S. This memorizes that exposure in the

meter; the exposure shown will render the subject you've just metered as shadow with

detail. If you now read that same subject, the meter will indicate that it is -2.7. It has

'placed' that metered area in the shadows. With this reading still in memory, you can test

other subjects to see where they fall. For instance, if there is a bright area that you want

to retain as a highlight with detail, and your reading of that area exceeds +2.3, then you

have to decide whether to adjust your exposure to retain the highlight at the expense of

the shadow detail. It's probably easier to do than to explain.

 

The highlight button works exactly the same way, except that you start with a bright area

of your subject.

 

If you're confident that you can find middle gray, read it and then press the Average

button. This memorizes that exposure as the correct average reading, and then you can

proceed to read the shadows and highlights to see if they still fall within -2.7 or +2.3

stops. If they don't, adjust your average exposure accordingly.

 

The Minolta F has flash capability. If you don't need that, the Pentax meters may be a

better choice. They use rotating dials that are marked with the shadow/highlight limits,

and tweaking an exposure with these dials is very easy. A side benefit of these dials is

that they show all the possible combinations of your exposure, whereas the Minolta only

shows one exposure at a time.

 

Hope that helps.

[david_senesac]

As to your specific spotmetering question of websites/information about how one meters, I'd say one can only learn so much from books, information, or instruction when it comes to metering outdoors in the field for large format. I use methods that would not be viewed as typical but get impressively accurate results. To simplify all my metering I work only in EV numbers and shoot just one type of film Provia 100F. After deciding what is the correct EV value from the range of metered elements in a scene, I set the shutter speed and aperture from charts. By just dealing with EV values the whole exposure metering process becomes more simple mentally. For me at least exposure is the most critical issue in the process and the most likely one to bear on results since I rarely bracket. One just has to get out and do it and go through a period of hit and miss exposures.

 

 

As such during the learning phase one ought to keep an accurate log/chart for every shot then compare the results with your processed film. Of course best to use just one type of film during that period because the specific film is a significant part of that equation. If I go to a new film, I then need to again start recording that information until my work becomes accurate. There are certainly different ways to go about figuring out exposure, but I don't complicate my own method by getting mathematical at all. Have shot a lot of film outdoors for many years and usually nail the exposure within 1/6 stop or so of optimum. I hate wasting sheet film by bracketing too, so rarely shove a second holder in after taking shots. Of course maybe 5 to 10 percent of the time I'm off 1/6 to 1/3 stop which can make me wish I bracketed at times but that is a choice I've made for my own cost sensitive style. I've used spot metering for many years, and know from experience how to digest metering pointed at different targets of a scene. But that is not something that I could easily explain to others because landscapes are so varied. There may be two scenes which meter exactly the same in all the different quadrants or sections one meters, but depending on the nature of the subject, I may know from experience that I need to boost up or decrease the exposure for the film to render it best. So beyond whatever you may be able to read, you are going have to get out and shoot, record, and evaluate the results to improve.

[stwrtertbsratbs5]

Darcy

 

Have you considered a class on the zone system? I'm enrolled in an excellent B&W zone workshop at the New England School of Photography here in Boston. The instructor, Nick Johnson, uses a book that he co-wrote (he prints spiral-bound copies at Kinko's because publishers aren't interested in new books on the zone system) and explains the concepts in very clear and concise terms. It's not nearly as complicated as most people make it out to be. Expose for the shadows and adjust development time for the highlights (for B&W). Does it work? Absolutely. My negatives are much improved.

 

For transparency film, I place the highlight and then check to see how much shadow detail I'll capture.

 

Let me know if you want a copy of the book (covers B&W only) - he charges $20 and shipping at media rates is cheap.

 

Robert