More K-40 Exposure Results

[chas_ucla]

Well my wife's art school project films came back from Dwayne's yesterday.

We used a Minolta XL-401 after the Bolex 160's internal metering system proved way faulty (see my earlier post on "shooting miniatures"). The good thing about the Minolta is that it is one of the few lower-end cameras that allows you to adjust the f-stops to whatever setting you want -- none of this horrid "EE Lock" business or one stop plus or down correction. Anyway, by using a grey card test, setting the camera on auto and checking the metering we were able to come up with the estimated correct stop. Judging by the well-exposed footage we were on the money almost every time. This was all interior shooting, using two 500W floods (3400), and no reflectors.
Now on to the re-shoots of my project...

[galago]

Could you post more info on the Minolta 401XL? I bought one because it had maual aperature control. I only shot a couple rolls with it, and that was guessing with the "sunny f16 rule". i shot the film a couple years ago.
this week i dusted it off and shot a roll of plus-x because i wanted to see if it was still working. I've tried to log my shots but if it's still hard to learn how the camera is working with so many variables.
Your post seems to imply that you used the macro function, I can't seem to find the original post, though. Did it work?

[chas_ucla]

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size=2 face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">quote:</font><table border="0" width="90%" bgcolor="#333333" cellspacing="1" cellpadding="0"><tr><td width="100%"><table border="0" width="100%" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="2" bgcolor="#FF9900"><tr><td width="100%" bgcolor="#DDDDDD"><font size=2 face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">Originally posted by galago:
Could you post more info on the Minolta 401XL?
Your post seems to imply that you used the macro function, I can't seem to find the original post, though. Did it work?</font></td></tr></table></td></tr></table></BLOCKQUOTE>

No, I never used the macro on the Minolta -- that only seems to work if you are 4 inches away. One of the other Minolta users on this board (sorry, I can't recall your name) suggested using close up filters so I bought a set off of e-bay (a set of 46mm diopters along with other filters for $10.00!) and used that for my miniature work.

But that was for my "action figures" stop-motion project. For the film I was mentioning above, you just need a Kodak grey card, put it in front of your subject, where the light falls, set the camera to auto exposure, check what f stop the camera is at, then switch to manual, and set the exposure that way and start filming. Perfect exposures almost every time.

If you need more info you can e-mail me.

Chas