> What I don't get, won't the color meter
> go crazy when you mount a medium yellow,
> or an amber, or a red, or a warming filter?
Yes it will. The F5's manual says that the
colored filters used for black and white can
cause the RGB meter to give incorrect results.
It recommends using center-weighted or spot
metering with colored filters and black and
white film.
Using a colored filter with color film isn't
any different than photographing a scene of
a different color. You probably want to fool
the meter in that case.
> I say this as an F5 user who has yet to see
> a difference based on color metering. Does
> anyone have a suggestion for a test that might
> show the value of color metering (or even to
> demonstrate that it actually exists?)
All of this discussion about whether a meter can
provide correct exposure assumes that for a given
scene, there EXISTS one correct exposure.
It just ain't so.
All meters try to get as much of the scene's
brightness range inside of the films range as
possible. A 'smart' meter (like the F5's) can
even try to guess whether it should chop of the
bottom or top of the scene's brightness range when
everything won't fit (which is often). That's
nice when it guesses right -- but it's still
only guessing.
Only the photographer knows what part of the image
he REALLY cares about, and where it should go in
the film's density range.
You and I could both be standing on the same beach
at sunset photographing the same person -- you want
to expose for the background and have the person
recorded as a silhouette, I want to expose for the
person's face, and let the background burn out.
What kind of meter's going to know that?
Use the spot when exposure matters (and you have time).
If you don't have time, and you think that RGB might
guess wrong, bracket. The more things change, the more
they stay the same, huh?
You don't really want your camera to be smarter than
you anyway, do you?
-Don
