The metering doesn't have to be done with an external meter. What you do is:
0) Put the lens on the camera, and set the camera to manual. 1) Meter with the lens mounted on the camera, using the internal meter. It's best to set the lens wide open at this point, as that's how the camera is going to treat the lens when it measures the light. 2) Turn the lens aperture ring to your desired shooting aperture. Count the number of f-stops by which you stopped the lens down. 3) Set the shutter speed to that many stops slower than metering said. It would be nice if you could use the exposure compensation feature to automatically perform step (3) [assuming you knew what your shooting aperture was going to be at the beginning] but you can't - the exposure compensation doesn't work in manual exposure mode. Bummer. > When I visited John Francis a while back, we put my K18/3.5 on his istD and were > able to get some good results without too much trouble once we (actually, John) > figured out what had to be done to get the exposure right. Maybe John can jump > in with some more details. Seems that he had to calculate (whoops! there's > another dangerous pitfall) some exposure compensation ... but it wasn't all that > hard. We had pens, pencils, calculators, and the owners of the Chinese > restaurant in which we had lunch kindly loaned us an abacus <vbg> > > However, based on what I now know, the A lenses might be the best manual focus > alternative for the istd. > > shel > > William Robb wrote: > > > About all I use is A series lenses on mine. > > I don't consider manual focus to be a work around, though others may. > > > > I haven't used a K lens on it yet, though I haven't ruled it out. Not having > > metering and having to use manual exposure is a work around, in that > > metering must be done with an external meter. > > There are a few work arounds, such as partially dismounting the lens and the > > like, but that sort of thing is not for me. > > > > William Robb >
