[Silent Street]

A separate handheld incident/spot/multispot meter will be required anyhow as part of the kit, as the 67 only meters to 1 second. None of my exposures are handled by the camera's TTL meter because they usually go on...and on...and on... anything from 15 second to 30 minutes (much longer still with pinhole).

---------- Post added 26th Jul 2019 at 07:36 AM ----------

Can they be corrected?

Yes.
By throwing it out and getting a new one.

Well, the rudimentary electronics is supposed to make repair or correction easy enough, though I have not tried it.

---------- Post added 26th Jul 2019 at 07:51 AM ----------

Thanks for the replies...all good advice. I went out this morning around dawn and shot a roll on an old abandoned house where a lumber crew had recently cleared around. Before, you hardly knew it was there from the two lane street.

I did use an old (circa early 60’s) Celestron tubular-legged tripod and a remote shutter plunger. Hoping my TTL meter is still somewhat accurate, but something tells me it’s off. Can they be recalibrated for less than an arm and a leg if I need to?

I’ll try to figure out how to post a couple of photos when I can. Thanks.

One way of checking the accuracy of the TTL meter is to load up a roll of slide film e.g. Provia 100F or Velvia 50 or Ektachrome 100. These films have a narrow tolerance for under- and over-exposure, and shooting specific scenes in both point light (bright sun) and octa (overcast, cloudy) light will be a revelation. Usually, third-stop intervals are the most preecise, (the P67 is a half-stop situation), so care must be used. The TTL meter has a 5-stop range from the centre (+2.5 / -2.5), so with slide film and a seeminly inoccuous scene being metered, any error will be glaringly obvious e.g. gross overexposure or unrecoverable underexposure. The TTL meter, when working fine is quite able to handle moderately contrasty scenes with any sort of film; this was one of my intensive experiments when I first came to grips with the beast a decade ago.

[Kmier]

Silent Street - very helpful info - thanks. Compared to my 645 (with the 75mm lens), which has always delivered good exposures for me, it looks like the 67 TTL is telling me to over-expose by 1.5 stops, fairly consistently from the 1/60 to 1/500 shutter speed range. If, when loaded with 400 Portra, I trick the iso dial to halfway between 800 and 1600, I match the 645 reading fairly accurately. Maybe a work-around for a while...

Darn! I was hoping a handheld meter wasn’t going to be required. What’s a good recommendation on a light meter app for an iPhone 10? I always have the phone in my pocket, so nothing else to remember to carry 😉. We’ll see what I get on my 1st roll. Maybe I shouldn’t put all my faith in the 645 meter just yet. Tomorrow I’ll compare to my Oly OM-D EM1, which I just picked up and almost fell over, with how small it now seems!

[Silent Street]

[///]
Darn! I was hoping a handheld meter wasn’t going to be required. What’s a good recommendation on a light meter app for an iPhone 10? I always have the phone in my pocket, so nothing else to remember to carry 😉. We’ll see what I get on my 1st roll. Maybe I shouldn’t put all my faith in the 645 meter just yet. Tomorrow I’ll compare to my Oly OM-D EM1, which I just picked up and almost fell over, with how small it now seems!

I do not use a phone for metering, though it has its use for myriad other references and applications e.g. The Photographer's Epheremis, Tides, Sunset/Sunrise times etc. Much more can be learned, and achieved, with a proper incident/spot/multispot meter which will allow you to separately meter variances in scene brightness — it is particularly important when exposing slide film correctly for e.g. printing, which is all I use at the moment. These meters are a bit deep in terms of features and customisation, so deep breath, steady walk...


Nothing else to remember to carry?? Well, once you get up to 17kg in your pack (my pack weight, with film, Mars Bars, jellies and jubes...), rest assured you need not consider, not even once, whether there is anything else to carry!

[tuco]

I use a light meter app for my phone a lot now. It's called "Lightmeter" and it looks like a brown, handhold meter. I have tested it against the Sunny 16 and my one-degree spot meter. I use the feature where it takes a picture to get the exposure to utilize any matrix metering in my phone's camera.

It places the middle gray up a stop pretty consistently from the Sunny 16 Rule where I live which is like a Sunny 11 Rule if you will. And when I pick the middle gray from a scene with my one-degree, I'm typically a 1/2 to a stop different than the light meter app too. With negative film this is no problem in general. With long-toe BW film you may want to be more cautious.

Here are some scenes with exposures used from the phone app you may have already seen:

[johnha]

My 6x7 meter also seems to be +1 to +1.5 compared to my Sekonic L408B (5 degree spot), but my negs seem to come out OK. Comparing with in camera matrix metering is a problem as you don't know what the algorithm is accounting for. The 6x7 meter isn't even centre weighted it just averages the whole frame, I don't think simple comparisons with computerised meters really tells anything.

I'd suggest burning a roll of chrome film based on your interpretation of the meter with a baseline shot from another meter, then you'll know where you stand. With negative film it probably doesn't matter unless you're after a precise exposure (where you'd probably be doing multi-spot or incident readings anyway).

[Kmier]

Thank you. What I’m hearing is that to become a proficient shooter, there’s no substitute for a more advanced handheld meter.

My reading list just jumped significantly!

[tuco]

Thank you. What I’m hearing is that to become a proficient shooter, there’s no substitute for a more advanced handheld meter.

My reading list just jumped significantly!

I have 3 one-degree spot meters. They don't agree by as much as 2/3 of a stop with one another.

[Silent Street]

I have 3 one-degree spot meters. They don't agree by as much as 2/3 of a stop with one another.

There is no binding industry standard for meters, and certainly not so much the fabled "18% grey". Gossen and Sekonic have for a very long time gone their own respective ways, which makes them both unique individually, and troublesome to some users. Differences can be put down to technical considerations like additive/sequential-MWA metering, particularly with the Sekonics that permit this (or subtractive metering). Sekonic meters are calibrated at 16.2% incident and 12.6% reflected (spot). I used some years ago, a Gossen 1°/ 5° spot, but sensitivity aside, a much more serious deficit was that it had no dioptric correction, thus making viewing more of a struggle than with the Sekonic (L758D), which does have dioptric correction (as others do too). That single feature (dioptric correction) will often restrict or sway users to a particular meter over other, more desirable types, but not to say that eyeglass wearers cannot spot meter with their glasses on — they certainly can, but others prefer not to. I do not wear my reading specs for metering.

[Silent Street]

What I’m hearing is that to become a proficient shooter, there’s no substitute for a more advanced handheld meter.

Proficiency will come from trial and error, success and failure, in whatever measure, however often or no. Great balls of fire will not arrive in your hands on a magic carpet...

[desertscape]

It is possible to use the TTL without a handheld meter but you must have some way of assuring its accuracy. One of the advantages of having two or three 67 bodies with TTLs is that you can compare readings between them. But if you must use the TTL for metering, you must use a grey card as the TTL meter is faked out of bright or dark parts of the frame.