Originally posted by SPII Hi all, I recently bought a spotmatic and have never shot manually in film. I am just wondering how you guys meter correctly as I assume this uses spot metering.
If you are taking a landscape shot in full sun do you focous on something closer roughly 18% grey, meter, then recompose your shot? Or just focus on the landscape, meter, compose then shoot? because I have noticed if there is a lot of light coming back i.e. off water or snow the meter says to stop down quite a bit further than seems right.
Sorry for the basic question, but I have never really done this before and love this camera.
A Spotmatic meters on average across the entire focusing screen, using a center-weighted emphasis. Although Pentax named the camera as if it used a spot meter, they wisely decided to produce a meter that could be effective across a wide latitude of conditions.
Metering correctly for highlights and shadows is always a challenge. With the match-needle meter you can compensate somewhat in-camera or you may use filters to compensate for especially bright highlights - in order to slow the shutter down enough to capture shadows.
Thankfully many film emulsions are very forgiving and can be processed so as to bring out detail.
All that being said, a calibrated, functioning Spotmatic CdS meter is quite good.