Yashica 124G built in light metering advise sort

[davecarrera]

Hi all
I own a fully working 124G and any photo I take that has no extreme ends of highs and lows in light, ie part sky part land, develops fine but when I take shots using just the built in light meter I tend to get fully blown out skys with no recoverable data in the negatives.

I can only assume the onboard meter when pointing at the darker part of the image is correctly metering at grey (5) but bright skys are to many stops up the scale to capture correctly.

Would doing the initial metering for the shadows then increasing say shutter speed two stops bring the darks down to (3) and help save the bright highlights?

I would like to be able to understand the build in meter that as I say seems to work fine but need to understand what I have to do to save sky details when out and about with it.

I use colour, B&W and reversal films.

Any advise is appreciated and I wish you well.

 

[cgw]

Buy and learn to use a handheld incident meter. Just because the 124G's meter "works" doesn't mean it's at all accurate.

 

[pendennis]

I've owned one, off and on, for over 45 years. Early on I learned not to trust the on-board meter. I bought a Gossen Super-Pilot, and then a Gossen Luna Pro, and learned to depend on them. I got results similar to yours, even when I metered low in the scene. I figured it was just part of how the meter's F-O-V was designed.

There is another issue with the G. There are no longer any mercury batteries available (except from Russia). I bought the MR-9 adapter which puts a constant 1.35v into the meter.

There is also another issue worth investigating. The leaf shutter is likely not firing @ 1/500 when set there. In fact, most leaf shutters don't fire at the set speed at higher settings. I had mine calibrated, and it came in @ 1/375 initially. The shop calibrated it to nearly 1/500 but couldn't quite get there. With print film it's not an issue, but with transparencies, it can be. A good CLA might be in order.

In the 90's, I bought a Pentax 1° Spot, and later on I added a Minolta F 1° spot meter.