• Members 1255 posts
    Jan. 4, 2026, 4:20 p.m.

    The model 6 p/n 560 is actually made under license by Sekonic, neither Weston nor Sangamo, 'tis said. Mine came with the optional Adams Zone dial, which is why I bought it out of interest.

    meter.JPG
    dial.JPG

    Took me a while to figure out the Adams Zones bit. There's a small arrow where "V" should be. Basically, it gets pointed to the meter reading on the inner dial by rotating the outer dial. Pick the desirable resulting aperture/shutter combo and the metered object will render as middle luminance i.e. the object will be "placed" in Zone V. To place the object, e.g. snow, in a lighter Zone, rotate the outer dial until perhaps "VII" is pointing at the meter reading ... or, for a coal heap, rotate the outer dial until "II" is pointing at the meter reading. These additional rotations change the exposure appropriately and are equivalent to Exposure Compensation now that the Zone System is almost forgotten.

    To test the degree of compensation for snow, I figured the Exposure Value recommended by the illustration above - it is 13 Ev. (from log2(N^2 / t).

    Then I turned the outer dial to align "VII" with the same meter reading on the inner dial - sure enough, the recommended Exposure Value changed to 11 Ev ipso fatso.

    dial.JPG

    JPG, 595.3 KB, uploaded by xpatUSA on Jan. 4, 2026.

    meter.JPG

    JPG, 356.9 KB, uploaded by xpatUSA on Jan. 4, 2026.

  • Members 2441 posts
    Jan. 4, 2026, 5:01 p.m.

    I made a home made zone scale that I placed on Pentax Spot meter back in the day. The spot meter was a great tool with film. My modern digital cameras have made it obsolete.

  • Members 1255 posts
    Jan. 4, 2026, 6:31 p.m.

    Cool. There's a guy still selling stick-on Zone scales for various light-meters.

    www.shutterspeedblog.com/

    For a Weston Ranger 9:

    Weston Adams scale overlay.jpg

    For a Pentax spot-meter:

    i.etsystatic.com/7602174/r/il/bb8424/4268443572/il_1588xN.4268443572_7xd3.jpg

    Weston Adams scale overlay.jpg

    JPG, 1.1 MB, uploaded by xpatUSA on Jan. 4, 2026.

  • Members 251 posts
    Jan. 4, 2026, 9:57 p.m.

    I still have my Pentax Spotmeter V with my homemade zone scale stuck on it plus two Weston Master V meters with improvised zone scales on them. Sadly the selenium cells in the Weston Masters are shot. I also have the Bronica 6x6 with its set of Nikkor lenses and some unexposed 120 film - so who knows, one day…

    best wishes

    A

  • Members 1255 posts
    Jan. 4, 2026, 11:07 p.m.

    I ordered this Master V a couple of days ago hoping that the cell is still good:

    www.ebay.com/itm/147007051917

  • Members 1255 posts
    Jan. 4, 2026, 11:16 p.m.
  • Members 2627 posts
    Jan. 5, 2026, 2:40 a.m.

    i did a test yesterday the see how accurate the spot meter was on my a7iv compared to the muilti metering with the subject covering the whole frame. they were 1 stop apart, so not real accurate.

  • Members 141 posts
    Jan. 5, 2026, 3:35 a.m.

    What did you shoot, a wall ?

    Ron

  • Members 1255 posts
    Jan. 5, 2026, 3:52 a.m.

    Donald, how did you measure the accuracy of the spot-meter? Did you know the luminance of the presumably homogenous subject? Do you know the K constant of the camera's reflective metering? If you did, you could see if the reflective metering equation t/(N^2)=K/(SL) balances ...

    For example, if N=8, K=12.5, S=100 and L=2000 cd/m2 then t should equal 1/250 sec.