Incident meters measure the light falling on the meter cell. An alternative is to use a camera built-in meter to measure the light falling on a 18% gray card. I carry a small one in my bag. An alternative is to measure the light falling on the palm of your hand and then open up one stop to approximate an 18% card. I sometimes forget the gray card but I always remember my hands. Now bracket the shot! Bill Lawlor
This reminds me of a customer I had at a lab I worked for in the early 90's. Allison had a ghost white complexion, shot Vericolor rated at 160 (I think she had a DX coded camera and didn't know how to override the Dx coding anyway) and would shoot 25-30 rolls at a wedding. She used the meter on the hand open a stop (with the camera's built in meter) and would invariably be underexposed 1-2 stops. She would then bring half to 2/3rds of the proofs back asking us to "punch up the color". I even suggested that she dress her kids in white, shoot 2-3 rolls bracketing like crazy, so we could get a working E.I. for her to get a properly exposed negative, and we would process the film for free. She refused because some photographic "guru" told her that the meter off the hand trick was the hot set-up. Needless to say, we lost money every time she came in. The moral of the story is: make sure you test any "tricks" before shooting something important. For those of you who are not familiar with early 90's Vericolor. It was Kodak's wedding/portrait film, very low contrast with absolutely no tolerance for underexposure. Most pros rated it between E.I. 125 and 80 with E.I. 100 the most common. We were also printing it on an old Noritsu QSS2 EP-2 machine (one of the first mini-labs produced). Disclaimer: This was not intended to question Bill's metering trick which does work reasonably well most of the time, especially if you bracket as suggested. BUTCH Each man had only one genuine vocation - to find the way to himself. Hermann Hess (Damien)
