First time using Sekonic L-758DR

[minesix66]

Hi,

Here is my equipment

Shen Hao 45A II with 75mm Nikkor
Stock Focus screen
Toyo focus loupe
Dark cloth with velcro
Kodak E100VS and Fuji Veliva 50

I was taking a picture of the sun setting at the beach and I spot metered the following at F22, 2 1sec and 2 sec? I metered to the right of the sunset, the water and beach. The question I have is I set the dial on the shutter at 1. Is the 1 on the shutter considered 1 sec or 1/10? Would you have chosen the 1? I also did a ambient meter reading of 2 putting the meter facing the sunset and then turning it away from me. What would have been the better way. Spot or ambient. This meter seems very confusing, sometimes I wonder if I am better with my vintage sekonic meter.

The other problem I had was trying to focus with the 75mm. I opened up the aperature to 4.5 and I was able to focus on the center but to the sides seemed very difficult. I tried to open up the bag bellows as much as possible. I read somewhere that I could buy a brighter screen for this camera. I read that these could throw off your focusing because they use a fresnel? Could someone let me know where I can buy the best one with framing lines on it?

[Bill Burk]

You have a great meter, it takes practice getting used to. Having both incident and spot meter in the same unit makes it easy to do a "sanity" check.

But you have to keep track of which mode you are in. Just Saturday I took several "spot" readings in incident mode.

Spot is good for sunsets.

1 on the shutter is 1 second, 10 on the shutter would be 1/10th of a second. Hard to say whether your exposure was right for the sunset since you would get different looks with different times and many of them are satisfying.

[IanMazursky]

But you have to keep track of which mode you are in. Just Saturday I took several "spot" readings in incident mode.

Ive done that a few times, interestingly the readings were not to far off considering the wrong mode.
The meter is fantastic but the mode that you are currently in could be better defined ie a solid detent.

I really love the spot meter, its great to see the numbers in the finder.
Also the built in PocketWizard transmitter is super helpful in the studio, no more dragging cables around the subjects head.

[minesix66]

Just developed the negs, must have messed up the times. The negs came out almost completely blank.

[Tim k]

Try this method. Set the readout to EI. The shutter speed will be shown on the left of the readout. Then take your spot readings and memorize them. They will show up as little tic marks below the f stop scale. That way its real easy to see the sbr and just pick a stop that makes you happy.