[rollei_list] Re: Metering dusk

  • From: Don Williams <dwilli10@xxxxxxx>
  • To: rollei_list@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Fri, 09 May 2008 15:44:49 -0500

At 09:33 PM 5/9/2008 +0200, Thor Legvold wrote, in part:

So just for kicks, how are you metering dusk shots to really bring
out the colours in the sky while balancing against the land/city/sea
scape? I'll go try a few more rolls and see if I can get one right on
the mark.

Cheers,
Thor

Here's another of my "off the wall" notions, and if you don't want to read that kind of comment, just delete this note.

Making the assumption that we want to make film images with a Rollei, but have some exposure issues (I just guess sometimes and it works) how bout:

Working with a digital camera that allows you to set the speed values (not sure which ones I would fix) and making comparison shots with the Rollei and digital at the same time.

If you can generate some sort of correlation, you might be able to use the digital as a very fine resolution spot meter.

I've never tried this approach because I do so little film shooting these days (sorry about that, but 120 color processing is a mail-out issue here, as far as I know). There's probably still a lab up the road in OKC but I haven't checked yet.

Anyhow, this might work for color, however, but of course there are many variables, gamma probably being one of the most important.

I believe, and the pros out there can expand if necessary, that for some period of time, color Polaroids were used for determining exposures for film cameras. Those days are over I guess, but we do have a possible replacement with digitals.

We now live on a slightly elevated piece of land and I can see city lights up to 10 miles distant, over the houses behind us, . . . when there are no tornados approaching. I have set a digital camera mode to, I think, Fireworks, or something similar, and got nice shots of the city lights in the distance. Not much need for street light photos, however I have also taken twilight shots and can either bracket them or fix the camera settings.

This is all more work than I would care to go to for now, but it might be a viable approach for a dusk metering system.

Regards,

DAW

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