Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 1999/09/04

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Subject: Re: [Leica] Whether to buy a seperate meter?
From: Eric Welch <ewelch@ponyexpress.net>
Date: Sat, 04 Sep 1999 05:21:23 -0500

At 09:33 PM 9/3/99 -0700, you wrote:
>The hull
>was bright white and the water near the pier looked almost black, so what do
>you meter on? The haze added a little more uncertainty to trying to estimate
>the exposure. So I took an incident reading next to the boat with the Luna
>Pro pointed half way between the sun and where I would stand with the
>camera.

Gary,

In those kinds of situations, I meter the bright white and make the 
exposure 2 - 2 1/2 stops overexposed for that white. An incident meter will 
know nothing about how white the boat is, and how dark the water is, and 
could very well put you right in the middle where neither is exposed 
properly. When shooting slide film, the white boat has to be kept at 2 1/2 
stops over or less, or it's a blown out mass of nothing. If the water is 
too dark, well, that's not as bad as blowing out the white. Experienced 
photographers can handle any situation with a reflected meter.

Eric Welch
St. Joseph, MO

http://www.ponyexpress.net/~ewelch

    My best work is often almost unconscious and occurs ahead of my ability 
to understand it. -Sam Abell; "Stay This Moment"