Zone VI modified Pentax Digital Spotmeter confusion

[David Lindquist]

Send them all off to a testing facility and have all of them calibrated to standard source and then that will not be a problem.

Any suggestions for a testing facility now that Quality Light-Metric is gone?

David

 

[DREW WILEY]

Richard Ritter just chimed in. Contact him.

 

[Sirius Glass]

Any suggestions for a testing facility now that Quality Light-Metric is gone?

David

I asked Samys Camera who had originally sent me to Quality Light-Metric. They gave me a new contact, but I cannot find it. Call Samy Camera, Los Angeles on Fairfax, ask for camera repair, and ask them for the referral.

 

[David Lindquist]

Thank you Drew and Sirius,

David

 

[Neil Poulsen]

Very interesting on the color filter that was added.

An undisputed master of Ilfochrome photography is Christopher Burkett, and he used (still uses?) a Pentax Modified meter for his color photography. He owned more than one, to make sure he always had one good working unit.

He's familiar enough with what to expect, he needs zero bracketing to obtain a well exposed sheet of film.

Not mentioned that I can see, I've always heard that Zone VI modified meters were designed to predict how different shades appeared on Tri-X film.

Another interesting tad-bit. I have both a Pentax digital modified meter and a Pentax V analog modified meter. Richard calibrated both of these meters, so their readings correlate really well. I use the digital meter in the field, and I use the analog meter at home for black and white calibrations. In conducting these calibrations, I need to take fairly close readings of my back illuminated, translucent, white target. I can take these close readings with the analog meter; but I can't obtain accurate readings close up with the digital meter.

 

[DREW WILEY]

Neil - I don't see how Chris can keep doing Cibas now that his last incoming order is over 10 years old. Hopefully, the rolls were kept frozen. He also had to resort to a third party to replicate some of the chemistry. And he's gotta be getting up there in age, so now mostly smaller camera work I suspect. At today's rates, shooting 8x10 chromes amounts to about $50 per shot with processing (he probably stockpiled some of that too), plus the expense of multiple 8X10 masking film sheets per image.

After the demise of Ciba, I sold off all my 8X10 chrome film, and replaced it with Ektar color neg film, which I still have a good stash of in my freezer, for sake of printing on Fuji Supergloss instead. The Fuji version is even better. But if I want to print chromes on it, I have to generate a precision interneg for it first, including the masking steps - so at today's rates, around $200 in materials expense per 8X10 image just to set up for printing. Add all the fussy labor, and it's gotta be a labor of love; it wouldn't be commercially realistic for a lab to do that - they'd scan the original and output the Supergloss print using a big laser printing device instead, linked to the RA4 processor.

Bracketing 8x10 shots has never been realistic, for several reasons : the sheer cost; lighting and motion can change surprisingly quickly in the field in relation to those slower exposures; and even more significantly, 8x10 holders weigh quite a bit and are bulky, so you can only tote a limited number of them in your pack at a time. The first shot has to count. But I never bracketed 4x5 shots either.