A Spot Meter's Epitaph

Ah Spot, we hardly knew ye. I had hopes that by the time I sat down to write this it wouldn't be a eulogy for another beloved gadget gone to camera equipment heaven, but alas let's all bow our heads. While I haven't mentioned it previously, about a month ago, on the outing I wrote about in Embracing the Elements, my Pentax Spotmeter V suddenly stopped giving readings, each press of the trigger button resulting in only a small deflection of the needle in the opposite direction of the reading scale. Fresh batteries didn't help and in any case the battery check showed there was power with either the old or new set. When I got home I pulled it appart but after several sessions of poking around looking for loose connections, shaking and blasting canned air to flush out debris that might be shorting connections and spraying with contact cleaner, no dice.

I managed to finish that days shooting by guesstimating exposures based on experience and the readings I had been getting up until the meter gave up the ghost, the resulting negatives appearing no worse for it. Since then I have been operating with my second meter, a Gossen Luna-Lux. While its simple over/under LED indicator is less refined than its more sophisticated Lunasix and Luna-Pro cousins, it's accurate and I can't recall a time when I wasn't able to get good exposures using it. I used it exclusively on the day I wrote about in my previous post and had no exposure issues. In fact on the outing I wrote about in A Follow Up Visit I used no meter at all, relying solely on my experience with the old Sunny 16 Rule, again without any bad exposures. 

But despite all this success without the Pentax, at least in terms of exposure determination, the current situation is something I can only regard as a temporary work-around. Accurate though the Gossen may be, and as handy as its option to switch between incident and reflected metering is, it's not a spot meter. 

Here is where I should pause as I don't want to take my reader's knowledge of metering too much for granted, especially when it comes to something as old-school as using hand-held meters. Briefly then, straight-up reflected metering will be familiar to many as the method used with the built-in metering in cameras, at least before the days of computerized evaluative scene analysis. It simply looks at all the light coming from the scene and gives you the exposure settings that will render it all as an average brightness scene. Adjustments may need to be made for scenes that should appear more or less than average brightness such as a snowy landscape or coal pile. Doing reflective readings with a hand-held meter can be even more challenging since all you can do is point it in the general direction of the scene where readings may be skewed by things that don't appear in the scene as seen through the viewfinder. 

Incident metering allows you to base your exposure on the amount of light it reads falling on to your subject, a simple and brilliant method as there is no need to account for how light or dark the subject itself is. For a guy who does primarily landscape type work however it's usually not possible to go to where my subject is to measure the light, so unless I'm confident the light is exactly the same where I'm standing it may not be possible to get a meaningful reading this way. 

The view through the Pentax Spotmeter V. The circle above the 11
on the exposure scale indicates the area that the meter reads from.

Spot meters are really just very discriminating reflected meters, having their own viewfinders with a smallish circle in the middle that indicates the actual area the meter is measuring. In the case of the Pentax Spotmeter V the area measured roughly equates to what you'd see through the viewfinder of a 35mm camera equipped with a 2400mm lens (something that would probably be more accurately described as a telescope.) Most other hand-held meters I'm aware of are roughly the same. In addition to the hand-held variety however, many more modern cameras include a spot metering option with their built-in meters, which I imagine would include many 35mm SLRs new enough to have autofocus as well as, of course, all but the most basic DSLRs and those rangefinder-like lensless digital jobbies. Whatever the case the ability to measure just a small portion of the scene being photographed allows a photographer to, for example, pick out one small area of the scene with average brightness and base their exposure on this knowing that nothing else in the viewfinder is skewing the readings. Taking it one step further they could also take a few readings from different parts of the scene, say the lightest and the darkest parts, then chose an exposure that ensures both ends of the scale will stay within the films exposure range. Add a few more conceptual details and you have Ansel Adams's famous Zone System. 

I cut my teeth on the Zone System, at least once I started to fall in love with black and white work. Specifically it was the version I learned from The Zone VI Workshop by the late Fred Picker. (The Zone System, for those of you not acquainted, makes use of Roman numerals, so that reads "The Zone Six Workshop.) I don't know if the way I go about things these days still qualifies me as a user of the Zone System. Dedicated practitioners may turn their noses up at the subjective loosey-goosey way I go about determining personal film speed (box speed is usually perfect with the acutance developers I favour) and developing times (start with the Massive Dev Chart recommendation and adjust to taste), I still use it conceptually to determine exposures when shooting however, and so long as I have the other variables controlled it doesn't let me down. And using the Zone System, in practical terms, really demands the use of a spot meter. 

But while a spot meter gets me reliable results, would they be any less reliable if I used other methods? Others may dispute this, but it's always been my experience that, saving for demanding high-contrast situations, with black and white film there is a range of exposures which could be considered equally correct in terms of the final results that can be obtained without heroic measures in the darkroom. It's not hard to hit that range most of the time without any meter at all, virtually always with a simple reflected meter as a sanity check. If you add the fact that its also possible for me to use incident metering in most situations I find myself in, it would be really quite rare for me to get an exposure using a spot meter that wouldn't have been just as good if I'd used something less specialized or even no meter at all. Compared to the number of exposures I lose for other reasons (most commonly cock ups resulting from the odd little quirks three of the four RB67 backs I own have) I might do well to worry more about those things and less about metering. 

Still, as I write these words there's another Pentax Spotmeter V that I found at a decent price on eBay on its way to me. Why bother if I could do just as well without it? I think it comes down to a sense of control. Having absorbed the Zone System zeitgeist I can't help thinking in those terms no matter what I'm shooting with or using to measure light levels. I know, for example, that that rock over there has a certain value relative to those clouds up there regardless of whether I have a spot meter to measure it. Just trusting that it'll all work out in the final image bugs me even if, in the end, I would have set the camera to f/11 at 1/30th of a second in any case. I still enjoy shooting this way, just not as much. I hope that package comes soon.