Exposure for colour film

[Barney]

Any tips on manual exposure calculations for colour film.

Using a meter, incident or reflective?

 

[trevormc]

I usually use a light meter and point towards my subject; most of my shots have been very close to what I require.

Trevor

 

[Topsy]

I've always found that incident metering favours slide film (slight underexposure) on meg film I use a hand held spot meter and meter off a mid tone (grass is a good one for me in the landscape but dry tarmac in the urban environment works) in the area of my subject.

 

[Downhill Specialist]

My method is usually incident meter with the bulb in in the same light as I'm shooting and I meter for the following films....

Gold 200 at 200
Portra 160 at 100
Portra 400 at 200
Portra 800 at 400
Ektar 100 at 100

That's the most popular colour stocks I use and usually get good results.

 

[FishyFish]

If it's a camera with built-in meter, I just use that, with perhaps some compensation if it's a dark or bright scene.

Un-metered, I use an incident reading in the same light as the subject. If I can't use incident metering, then I'll take a reflected reading (usually using a light meter app on my phone that allows me to zoom in on the scene to match the camera's field of view). Again, I might adjust settings depending on the scene, but mostly I don't.

 

[StephenM]

I, being lazy, assume that if two films have the same ISO rating, then I can expose then both the same regardless of whether they are colour or Black and white. So, nothing changes for me.

If FP4, then I set my meter to 80 because I prefer to hold shadow detail. My method of actually using a meter is invariant.