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A guy at the camera shop in Portland told me to meter for the shadows and my whole roll of Portra came back muddy
So last spring I was shooting my friend's backyard wedding on my Pentax K1000 and I stopped into this little camera shop in Portland to grab a couple rolls of Portra 400. The older guy behind the counter saw me loading up and told me flat out, meter for the shadows, always. He said film has tons of room in the highlights and you want to protect the dark stuff. Sounded smart, so I did it for all 36 frames. Every single photo came back at least a stop overexposed, and the whites in the tent shots are just gone, blown out to pure paper. The skin tones are washed out and the whole roll feels flat and lifeless. Turns out for color negative film you usually meter for the mid tones or even the highlights, not the shadows, because negative film handles overexposure way worse than I thought. I ended up reprinting 8 of them at a lab in Seattle and they still look bad. So what's the actual rule here, do you meter for highlights, midtones, or just bracket everything and pray?
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the_sarah2d ago
Gotta love when the guy at the camera shop drops some ancient wisdom that turns out to be total nonsense for your film stock. Metering for shadows is great advice for slide film or digital where blown highlights are dead forever, but color negative film is the total opposite, it loves light and hates being underexposed, and your experience is proof that his rule was backwards for Portra. The real trick is to meter for the midtones, or if you want to be safe, meter for the brightest part of the scene and open up a stop or so, because negative film can take a little over but not a lot. Honestly though, blown whites on a whole roll sounds less like a metering rule problem and more like your K1000's meter might be off or the lab pushed the development, so get the camera checked too. Bracketing is fine but you'll burn film fast, and for a wedding you only get one shot at those moments, so learn your meter and trust it. Next time skip the old guy's advice and just expose for the skin tones, that's what actually matters in portraits.
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