Light Meters and Film

Tim Parkin

Amateur Photographer who plays with big cameras and film when in between digital photographs.

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Talking to various manufacturers over the last couple of years I’ve always inquired into the growth of interest in film photography. Three years ago the answer was a tentative “yes” to film becoming more popular but the last two years have seen even more positive responses. I asked about film sales, chemical sales and also interest in processing. The general size of growth has been about 30% year on year, and we have also seen a big increase in the second-hand price of cameras on eBay - long gone are the stories of picking up Hasselblads for less than a hundred pounds.

For some reason On Landscape had a reputation as being a cliquey club of beard stroking large format photographers and when we started the business I consciously avoided too much film related content to try to downplay this (mostly false) reputation. However, there is so much interest in film now that I would feel neglectful not to cover some aspects (even Amateur Photographer is now regularly posting film related articles. We can’t let them hog the limelight!).

So what to cover? Well, the big question I get asked is how to meter for film, especially for slide film. So here we are, a first article on metering for film. Some of what I’ll be talking about is also relevant for digital, so if people express an interest, I’ll expand into that area as well - for now, we’ll start with a general introduction to the different types of metering.