Originally Posted by
Drew Wiley
Unless you've already experimented with a particular film under analogous lighting conditions, and in effect have memorized settings in relation to actual metering beforehand, any generic approach sounds risky to me. Portra 160 is a low-contrast film with some latitude forgiveness, but rounding that off a whole stop of overexposure is going to lead to some kind of qualitative compromise in hue reproduction. It's basically a soft portrait film. I use Ektar color neg film in our mountains, but it's quite a bit fussier and far less forgiving of either metering error or color balance (color temp) errors. But once mastered, it has a clean saturated look much like chrome films. An accessory handheld meter really doesn't add that much extra weight. I'm now into my 70's myself; but the weight of a meter is barely more than a couple of energy or candy bars.
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