Originally Posted by
rdenney
The spot meter supports approaches like the Zone System, where you intentionally place the brightness of specific details of the scene into target tones on your print. There is a lot of craft that goes into actually getting those detail brightness levels to those tones, and that's what the Zone System is all about. But it starts with the ability to measure the brightness of those details in the scene.
If you don't explore those approaches, you can get away with just about any hand-held light meter. I have everything from a vintage Vivitar Model 43 (actually a very decent meter) to a Sekonic L-718. For large format, I still use one of my Pentax Spot V's, though those d'arsonval meters in them are starting to get a bit flaky. The electronic spot meters tend to read out in exposure rather than in EV, and so require more mental arithmetic to get zone readings. The mechanical calculator dial on the Pentax is a big reason why it is so popular, because one can scan all the zones at once.
Had I to learn it all over again, I'd probably use a digital camera to determine exposure, which requires enough experience to learn how the sensor in the digital camera and the film in the large-format camera respond differently. But the photos I take on the digital camera have near-zero marginal cost.
Rick "digital is the new Polaroid" Denney
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