Mr Brunner - why not test your theory on people in Hollywood who makes their living using Pentax
spotmeters. Bet they'd get a good laugh.
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Mr Brunner - why not test your theory on people in Hollywood who makes their living using Pentax
spotmeters. Bet they'd get a good laugh.
I'm one of them. They haven't laughed:Quote:
Originally Posted by DREW WILEY
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1591348/
Now that isn't a huge credit list because I have to be bribed or otherwise coerced into shooting movies. The bulk of my career has been television, and the bulk of that is TV commercials, a couple of thousand of them over the last three decades, many for national clients. I'm retired these days, hate and avoid LA, work on my art and my vineyard, and sail my boat. I still shoot a few local spots for folding cash. The point is that trying to impune my street cred is a backfire.
I do occasionally have a meter re-calibrated if it seems to be misbehaving, but specifically on movies or big commercial projects we shoot tests with the specific emulsions and batch we are going to use, using the meters lenses and bodies that will be on set. If the batch number on an emulsion changes, we would test that other batch as well. That's how its done.
Again, a day of testing is worth an infinite number of calibrations.
Well, glad to hear your admission that even you believe in recalibrating meters when necessary. I don't think it's any coincidence that Quality Light Metric is stationed in Hollywood, and that all he
does is work on Pentax meters. But like you, I avoid LA whenever possible. I'm in favor of a border
fence across the Tehachapis isolating LA from Calif proper, or else a good earthquake that snaps
its off and lets it drift.
When did George (Quality Light Metrics) start limiting his business to just Pentax meters? Last time I talked to him he worked an all sorts of meters.
p.s. LA isn't half as bad as you make it sound. :)
He does my SpectraCine's.Quote:
Originally Posted by BrianShaw
He does my Westons too.
He's done my Gossen Luna Pro F.
A "miscalibrated" spot meter!? So you're thinking it might have been trod on, chucked around, dropped, left out int the sun...?
True, digital spot meters (or incident/reflective/spot/flash meters) do have the provision to be calibrated based on lengthy, proven experience by the photographer to a specific situation (my own is calibrated to +0.5 baseline),true also, they can be reset to factory defaults, if that will put you at ease. Old style analogue meters are not a reliable investment given their primitive measurement devices that do deteriorate over time. A rudimentary test of a spot meter (or all functions of a hand-held meter) would be to use alongside a reliable SLR, also with spot metering e.g. Olympus OM4, any one of the high end Nikons etc. The readings do not necessarily have to be identical but they should be close measured from the same position and looking at the same place.
Perhaps that was just hyperbole, but it's what he told me about a year ago when I sent him a spotmeter that fell into a creek. Maybe he's winding things down, maybe not. I'm obviously not in
the neighborhood. Doing more than one kind of meter would make sense esp since Pentax is no
longer actually mfg meters. I've got three of them and certainly wouldn't want any of them reading
differently from the others, though one of them has about mechanically had it. I use these for all
formats, all kinds of film.