Help with Flash Exposure Puzzle

turbines

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I have consistently found that the settings given by my Minolta Flashmeter III give exposures that appear to my eye to be about 2/3 stop over exposed. I have two of these meters and both agree. Both meters have recently been calibrated by a professional lab and both consistently give continous daylight exposures that agree with Sunny 16 rules. The guide numbers calculated from the under exposed frames more closely agree with the flash manufacturers' GN specification then do the meters' exposure recommendations. Can anyone explain why such descrepancies might exist?
 
You prefer an underexposed shot?
A meter is only automated, it doesn't interpret the scene.
 
It would be okay if you were shooting color negative film and using the incident meter to peg your shadow values. Like, if the Flashmeter III were from back in the days of VPS 160, which so,so many people rated 2/3 of a stop overexposed at ISO 100. Wait...wait...that meter is from the days of VPS...:lol: (self-disclosure--my flash meter is from the same era..the Reagan era...)

I dunno....seems like you could easily either adjust the meter using the calibration screw a little more than one click-mark on the back to bring the meter reading more in line with how you want to have it read, or deliberately mis-enter your ISO values.

I mean, if you're reading incident flash metering and want to "peg" the highlight values, you'd want the meter to read one way,and if you were using it to peg shadow values, you'd want it to read as if a more "generous" exposure were called for.
 
I have consistently found that the settings given by my Minolta Flashmeter III give exposures that appear to my eye to be about 2/3 stop over exposed.

Based on that comment I assume that by your eye means that your not taking the overexposure part off the histogram, but from your owen viewing of the image on your computer - at which point I wonder if your computer monitor is itself calibrated? A simple factor that might make images seem brighter than they should be (esp if your using an uncalibrated flatscreen monitor)
 
Thank you Overread; you nailed it. I had completely forgotten about monitor calibration and recently acquired a new flat screen. You were correct; the brightness was set quite high.
 

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