Originally posted by bbluesman
This image was a vivid reminder of the days of Kodak Pan, Plus and Tri-X film and trying to deal with the positive and negative aspects of the then
new-to-me TTL metering with a Spotmatic.
More often than not, I had better results in this sort of high contrast situation by metering off of a typical subject (a hand?) and pre-setting the exposure than I did with dynamic TTL metering. I believe this was because the center-averaging exposure was constantly re-calculating the scene rather than than the desired subject.
Although I thought TTL metering for close-ups and extension tubes/bellows work was magic, it was my habit to use predictive, manual metering for this sort of scene and it remains my habit even today with DSLR's. I see no reason to allow TTL metering to mess up a perfectly good exposure calculation and the histogram and instant review take all the guess work out of the prediction.
With post-processing able to salvage both highlights and shadows now it's even better IMO.
H2