Metering with the Mamiya 7

the mamiya 7 (no idea about the 7II) meter is actualy a spot meter, and the direction it’s pointing at may vary. I figured out where the spot is in my viewfinder by pointing at a bare light bulb in an otherwise dark room. you can clearly se when the meter “sees” the bulb. once you know what part of your viewfinder meters ; use it as a standard spotmeter! few thoughs about metering : -a metering device (camera or handheld) gives a reading for medium grey. It means whatever you point it at is gonna be medium luminosity on the picture. You can meter for something that’s actualy medium grey (train yourself into recognizing a medium 18% grey) : on this photo I metered for the sidewalk If you meter for grey, everything else is gonna fall into it’s place ; if grey in the world makes grey on the picture, then white makes white and black makes black. this is called “acurate metering”. For any given scene there is only one acurate metering. Other option is to meter for whatever you want, and compensate for the difference : For this shot I metered for the snow, and overexposed by two stops because i wanted the snow to be much brighter than medium grey. As a basic rule, black is two stops daker than medium grey and white is two stops brighter. This technique is a bit more complicated than the other one but it works all the time because you don’t have to have something medium grey in the picture. With a bit of training, you can virtualy meter off anything! Nota : 1 these techniques work with spot meters because you know exactly what you’re pointing at. 2 By “medium grey” I mean anything that is of medium luminosity (18% reflexion). it could be any color, it doesn’t matter, a light meter basicaly sees the world in black n white. 3 Fun exercise: just like i showed you where i metered for my pictures, browse some pictures on flickr (or your own) and try to figure out where they metered, and what compensation they used. I hope this is helpful for people having trouble metering with mamiya7, and i hope i didn’t make it sound more complicated than it is! :) Next step is to be familiar with the film you use, and with the concept of “contrast range”, to make sure the contrast of the scene you want to capture simply isn’t too wide. happy shooting!