Those with meterless rangefinders: how do you set your exposure?

Those with meterless rangefinders: how do you set your exposure?

  • I spot meter everything. Usually twice.

    Votes: 34 3.7%

  • I use a handheld incident meter with every shot.

    Votes: 135 14.7%

  • I only meter when I think the light has changed.

    Votes: 390 42.4%

  • I use the sunny 16 rule almost exclusively.

    Votes: 211 22.9%

  • I use an EV chart.

    Votes: 43 4.7%

  • I have been shooting long enough that it is intuitive for me.

    Votes: 107 11.6%
  • Total voters
    920
When I want to travel light and during daytime

When I want to travel light and during daytime

I find this little selenium cell Sekonic (no model name) quite handy. It has a shoe clip on the bottom, but I usually use the neck strap and drop it in my shirt pocket. As you can see it's quite small.

It's old, but it's obviously spent most of it's life with the door on the front closed AND in it's little leather case, because the cell is quite active and accurate.

My other option for more range of exposure is a Gossen Luna Pro digital.

I am just comfortable enough with Sunny 16 to corroborate those rules with these (or other accurate) meters. Mostly reflective, sometimes incident.
 
Principally, with luck.

But...my Weston Master III has seen its fair share of use when I have time to dial in the exposure
 
I use sunny 16 and derivatives. I make mistakes, and learn from them. If I carry a meter, I meter occasionally just as a sanity check.

It's been said better than I can, but there is only a limited range of possible values for exposure. You start to recognize situations and lighting that is similar to what you experienced in the past.
 
when my camera doesn't have a meter I use Sunny-16 & guess more often than not, but when I have my Sekonic Twinmate-II meter with me I use it (I really like that meter!).
 
Outside I usually follow Sunny 16. Indoors or under artificial light I prefer to establish a baseline with a handheld meter, usually a beat up Vivitar CdS meter I keep in my jacket pocket.
 
I take a first reading (one under light, another under shadow) and follow it throughout the day. Only check ocasionally, to make sure or if the light has changed.
 
Usually an incident reading with a Weston Master V or a reading off the palm of my hand biased toward the shadows. I like shadow detail, nice open shadows, on the negative. I tend to overexpose by about half a stop. The sunny f/12.5 rule?
 
I usually have one of my four or five meters with me but, unless it's a critical photoshoot where I might be concerned with contrast differences in the scene, I do not use any. If I'm just out with either the M4 or the Hasselblad 501, I'll just rely on a combination of EV chart and sunny-16.

I voted EV chart as it's the closest to how I operate most of the time but I don't carry nor have I memorized any of the EV charts. What I've done is learn to read the light in EV values for a standardized film speed (ASA 100) for the situations I'm likely to encounter and then adjust for the actual speed of the film I'm using. This is fairly easy to do, actually; there's only a few situations (atmospheric conditions and time of day plus some indoors values) you need to memorize and standardizing on ASA 100 simplifies it considerably. Using EV values also makes it incredibly easy to evaluate the results of my "metering" across different shoots and films.

This system also helped me recognize a malfunctioning meter when I was out shooting. I was quite skeptical when my Digisix indicated EV 17 for ASA 100 on a nice clear day (no snow or beach sand around for hundreds of miles).
 
When I was a kid and didn't know what a light meter was I set the aperture and shutter speed according to the little figures printed inside the box of film i.e., man standing under a tree = 1/60, f/8, and the photos always came out right.
 
When I still had the M4, I went by the sunny 16 rule. I even had a small piece of paper with some most common situations taped to the back of the camera, just to make the process earier..

With the Bessa-T, I use the built-in meter, measure something middle grey once and then keep that exposure untill the light changes..
 

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Polls like this make the less initiated or those weaned on TTL metering cameras think that it's impossible to shoot without meters. OR cameras without meters are just two steps next to being unusable. :D

Exposure tables, shooting in good light (where a good deal of all exposures happen anyway), and shooting on BW or colour film do not require on-the-dot exposures. Its different of course when one shoots on slides or, digital.
 
I use a Gossen Super Pilot SBC for incident readings, and do a "reality check" between it and what I think should be correct for the situation. I'll check the meter occasionally as the light changes. If I forget to take the meter with me - and I have - experience serves well enough though I might feel a bit insecure. :)
 
Mostly I shoot with Sunny f/16 (though it's more Sunny f/11 around here). And look at the sky to adjust the exposure parameters.
The Ultimate Exposure Calculator was a big help when I was learning what worked and what does not.

Though these days I use my VC II meter when in doubt. Usually at low light levels.
 
Exposure meters... I find no joy at all using them. I went into film photography because I wanted to learn the hard way, no sensors, no white balance, no auto-focus, no shoot-n-check, and of course exposure metering by eye, even if my slr´s have meters which I don´t use.

The ultimate exposure calculator is great and makes things a LOT easier and faster to get into, although I finally made my own table and a/s/ISO rules and I´m just having a lot of fun with it :)
 
Colour negs have even more tolerance for overexposure than B&W. Not good with underexposure though.

When it is "too dark" I dont meter, I just take photos wide open with as slow shutter speed as I think I can. Other than that I try to meter from shadows or bit below mid-gray to get good shadow-detail.
 
Svitantti said:
Colour negs have even more tolerance for overexposure than B&W..
Click to expand...
I thought it was the other way round; and I distinctly remember checking out the original Reala datasheet and being amazed about the rather limited -3 to +2 latitude.

What I do notice however is that with cameras that measure accurately for slides, I need to dial in exposure compensation to avoid underexposure on colour print film. This might at first glance give the impression that colour print film works better when overexposed.. although when I really compare cameras/meters I notice there's a difference in bias for slide vs. negs...
 
I make a guess first, then check my VCII to see how accurate I was. If I am shooting something a little brighter or darker than the general scene I'll adjust accordingly. Once I have the standard shot captured, if the subject interests me sufficiently then I'll try out over- and under-exposures to see the results. It's a continuous learning process.
 
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