The Zone Light Meter Blog
Long-form guides on light metering, the Zone System, and the analogue corrections that turn a meter reading into the right exposure. Updated as ideas land.
Zone Light Meter 1.4: Bigger Text, Favourites, B&W Filters
Zone Light Meter 1.4 adds a text size setting, starred gear, a B&W filter preview, XPan and 6x17 formats and 37 new bodies, all asked for by film shooters.
Color Filters for Black and White Film: What Each Does
What yellow 8, orange 21, red 25, green 11 and blue 47 filters do to skies, skin and foliage on black and white film, with real filter factors and metering.
Shooting Panoramic Film: XPan 24x65 and 6x17
How to frame, meter and expose panoramic film on an XPan or a 6x17 camera: real angles of view, centre filter factors, frames per roll and depth of field.
Minolta Film Cameras Guide: Autocord, CLE, X-700, Maxxum
Minolta film cameras for film shooters: Autocord shutters by model, the CL and CLE with their M-Rokkors, SR-T to X-700, Rokkor glass and Maxxum quirks.
Push and Pull Processing, Explained
How to push or pull film: rating at a new EI, changing development, what it does to shadows and contrast, and how far Tri-X, HP5 and Portra go.
How to Expose Expired Film
Expired film exposure compensation: the one stop per decade rule, why storage beats the date, how each stock ages, and how to test a roll first.
Metering Infrared Film Through an IR Filter
How to expose infrared film behind an R72 filter: meter without it, add stops, bracket hard. Films that still see IR, focus shift and reciprocity.
The Zone System for Film Photographers in 2026
A complete guide to Ansel Adams's Zone System for negative and slide film, with worked examples and placement-and-fall practice.
The Best Light Meter Apps for Film Photography in 2026
Honest round-up of light meter apps for film: Zone Light Meter, Pocket Light Meter, myLightMeter Pro, FilmMeter, Lightme, and Lumu.
The Sunny 16 Rule, Explained
Where Sunny 16 came from, how to use it as a starting point, where it breaks down, and how to back it up with a real meter reading.
Reciprocity Failure, Stock by Stock
Why long exposures need more time than the meter says, with corrected times for 14 popular film stocks and a chart covering the full catalog.
How Zone Light Meter Does Reciprocity Correction
The mechanism behind the long-exposure numbers: a per-emulsion Schwarzschild exponent fitted to manufacturer data, applied past one second and stacked with every other correction.
Multi-Spot Metering for Film
How to take three or more spot readings, weight them by importance, and arrive at the exposure your subject actually needs.