Frantisek ... It's not rocket science. It's not even brain surgery. If you're using a spot meter, meter the face and shoot at the indicated exposure. That will actually give you a little less than Zone V according to extrapolation of information from Kodak.
Remember, all skin tones aren't equal, so you may have to run some tests to find which tones should fall into what "zone". It's not always "zone VI" for Caucasians, either. If they have a tan, or a ruddy complexion, or are especially pale, you may have to adjust a bit. IOW, there is no simple, direct answer for all people under all situations. Go out and shoot some film, process it, print it, and see what the results are like. Frantisek Vlcek wrote: > But I am already figuring this into my exposure! I wrote in my post > "spotmetering faces and placing them at Zone 6" - that means because > usual caucassian faces are about 1 stop brighter than medium gray (18% > gray) for which meters are calibrated. So I need to open up one stop > from the spotmeter reading. I use a simplified zone scale with the > spotmeter, otherwise, it's almost useless. The problem is, I haven't > figured yet how much the reflectivity of faces of dark skinned people > (especially of certain ethnics, from middle Africa) differs from 18% > gray. I know that for the caucassians, it's Zone 6. But what zone for > them? Zone 4? 4.5? If it was normal portraits, I would be using > incident metering. -- Shel Belinkoff mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://home.earthlink.net/~belinkoff/ - This message is from the Pentax-Discuss Mail List. To unsubscribe, go to http://www.pdml.net and follow the directions. Don't forget to visit the Pentax Users' Gallery at http://pug.komkon.org .
