This has nothing to do with any large format camera.

I owned a handful of spotmeters before, some were broken (either by accidents or my recklessness) or sold. Right now I am using a Minolta Spot Meter F. It states it read down to EV 1. The problem comes when it's very dark, I am struggling with < EV 1. I can't tell the exposure using it, for example, I wouldn't able to tell what exposure to use for this pic without the 20D.


I did wonder if my spotmeter is broken, but switching to EV mode, it seems that it only tell me E (Error) while the EV is under 1. So I guess the meter should be fine.

I was thinking to sell the spotmeter F and get the Sekonic L-558. But at the last minute I changed my mind, I figured I could use graycard for flash exposure (I will use the spotmeter for flash purpose in the future), so I didn't get the L-558.

I am kinda confused...what should I do?

Guess you'll have to do it the way they did back when the earth was still cooling. An educated guess and lots of bracketing.

Quote:

On 2006-06-13 17:19, glennfromwy wrote: Guess you'll have to do it the way they did back when the earth was still cooling. An educated guess and lots of bracketing.

That's how I do all my medium format stuff... I've done it enough I can get a good idea what I should be shooting at.

One option in the scene above would be to meter areas that are bright enough for the meter to work, and place them on the desired zone. For instance, you might be able to meter from the orange clouds, or some part of the nearby trusswork, and instead of expecting those to be Zone V, place them on Zone VI, VII, or even VIII (by exposing one, two, or three stops more than the meter reads from that part of the scene). In your scene, in fact, those values seem to be close to Zone VI (for the clouds) and Zone IV (for the lit areas of the trusswork), so if either is bright enough for the meter to register, you'll get at least some indication of exposure.

Otherwise, one rule of thumb I recall (for B&W films with conventional reciprocity failure curves like Tri-X) is that ISO 400 under common vapor street lamps requires about 1 minute at f/16 to record a well lit, but still obviously "night" scene. Color photography is obviously complicated by color shifts when reciprocity failure occurs, filter factors when correcting for color shifts, and reciprocity characteristics that vary wildly from one material to the next (unlike B&W, where 90% of the films on the current market can be treated alike for 90% of exposures over one second).