Stopped-Down Metering

[sdgmusic]

I have some sweet lenses for my old 35mm pentax and I have an adapter ring to add them to my new Sony DSLR.

What is Stopped down metering, and how do it do it?

 

[Don Simon]

Stopped down metering is simply where you close the aperture on the lens to your chosen f-stop... you have to do this manually since there is no mechanism or signal between body and lens to do it for you. Therefore when for example you want to meter for and to shoot at f/8, you set the lens to f/8 and close the aperture using the little open/close switch on the lens. The camera's meter will not give you a correct reading for f/8 unless the lens is actually stopped down to f/8. Once stopped down it should give you a correct meter reading for that aperture, assuming you are using manual or aperture priority mode. I'm just going by how my Minolta film SLRs work (same lens mount) but I think it should be the same.