[Leica] given up: now spot metering

[firkin at ncable.net.au (Alastair Firkin)]

G'day,
I have spent a long time trying to "learn" to estimate exposure, so 
that I could set the M's without bringing them up to my eye. Same goes 
for focus and those neat little tabs on the early Leica lenes (I love 
that). Its not too hard and as you say is aided by film latitude. Now I 
am going the opposite direction, and will soon be doing mainly spot 
metering and quick "zone" estimations. This is not good for a street 
grab, but great for other forms of photography. Hasselblad got all 
excited about it with the release of the 205TCC, and it has made sense 
to me. Now that I've been using it, I love it.

Trick is AFAICS, to grab a reading from the highlights set it to a zone 
your film/sensor can tolerate by prior experience and in "general" let 
the image follow suit. If you need to be really fancy, check the 
lowlight as well and establish a range, adjusting contrast to suit, but 
I suppose that is what the histogram does for you in a graphical way. 
Checking histograms and re-exposing is slow however and is not going to 
suit the needs of the M user.

On 08/02/2006, at 19:19, Scott McLoughlin wrote:

> Probably like many others, I have my D70's little LCD screen more
> or less permanently set to the "display histogram" mode :-)
>
> I can't directly translate in my head a histogram into the visual 
> appearance
> of a photo, but I imagine I'll get there soon enough. For now, I 
> generally
> just shoot raw and try to "expose to the right" while avoiding blown
> highlights.  From there, should I have the motivation and energy, alot 
> can
> be tweaked during RAW conversion.
>
> Maybe if I were more careful, I'd use the D70's spot meter on the 
> highlights
> and adjust exposure from there, but I haven't spent the time to master
> that technique yet.
>
> But you got to hand it to film where some crappy exposures can often
> be molded into nice photos in the darkroom. On this very list, I 
> believe, I've
> read that HCB himself - patron saint of we Leica users - guestimated 
> exposure
> often and relied on a tight relationship with a master printer.
>
> Now, that's not me. I use a nice metered M6TTL and have 2 Sekonic
> meters I'll sometimes use in incident mode "just in case" :-)
>
> Scott


Alastair