Okay, I picked up on this thread during my bar lunch today, and not having digested either the 'meal' or the thread too well, I feel I might be able to contribute a simple solution to all of this crap that seems to be going down.
1. The words infer and imply do not mean the same thing.
2. Old cameras never did well with exposure if using their own built-in abilities, other than those with spot, which was also usually far too wide to be much use.
3. For olde filme days, you learned to use a Weston with or without Invercone. For black/white you directly measured the darkest shadow (by reflected light reading of it) that was important to you, exposed for that and developed for the highlights i.e. you tended to differ somewhat from the recommended processing times the makers suggested, and, as with camera makers, they suggested, assuming that you were bright enough to know what your intended result was all about.
For transparencies, you used the same meter, with an Invercone fitted, and simply pointed from the subject to where the camera was; if the subject was more side-lit than directly, you pointed between camera and light - usually sun in my case - and set the machine to that. If you couldn't get close enough to the subject with the Invercone, you could use a real spot meter and measure a highlight, such as a white person's face, open a stop and a bit, and click.
My Nikon F had no metering prism; the F2 came with a Photomic head which after the first attempt, I refused to consult ever again; the F3 had a meter of sorts, and the F4s I kept for such a short time that I can't truthfully remember much about it, other than it never loaded properly first time, causing much embarrassement, and a rapid selling off of it. The various FM bodies were only bought to enable a faster flash synch, and rarely used: they sounded and felt like old sardine tins. With rust. The tins, not the cameras.
Once I'd bought myself a Minolta Flash Meter 111, the various Westons went to permanent sleep.
4. Happy digital days. I only ever bought two Nikon digital bodies, the D200 and the D700. On both, Matrix works bloody well enough to make life reasonably free from tears. But, as with everything that's supposed to 'help' you into foolproof mode, it can be a mixed blessing because it takes away the will to think beyond pretty pretty image: you slide into the bad habit of only seeing what's in the viewfinder and not thinking much beyond that, quite a different approach to film, as detailed above.
But there's a perfectly good solution which removes the need to depend on anything but the ASA ISO setting: use an incident light meter and trust it. I've run tests recently on that very thing, and if I set the camera to what the incident light reading is, ignoring the silent screams of protest of the built-in meters, I don't blow highlights where they exist (and not all shots have them) and the other tones fall into place just like with transparencies.
This may read as heresy to some - I neither know nor care - but it works for me on those tests and that's all that matters to me. Try it for yourselves if you still have hand-held meters.
Rob C
