Ok, so we've got some sort of accurate light meter, now lets get to measuring exposure for film! I'm going to break this down into several types of lighting conditions you might find while shooting landscapes and give you metering options for both color film types. Keep in mind that metering is an area where you have a lot of say in how you want the image to look. Do you want the bark on that tree to be dark or light in tone? Do you want realistic light or are you going for a certain mood that may call for a brighter or darker look? Do you want the snow to be bright white or would that take away from the colorful sunrise sky above? Don't go from my word on all of this, look into your own artistic vision and decide from there. All of that is up to you but I'm still going to give you all sorts of advice to help you meter quickly in any condition. Alright then, here we go:

How to use your meter

I tend to think in aperture priority. I don't really care if that's your personal preference or if it's right or wrong, it's just been how my mind works ever since I've started in photography. It just makes sense with landscapes because aperture is the aspect of exposure control that affects your image the most when you've already got the camera on a tripod. We need to know how much of the image we are going to get in focus, and since we're on a tripod it typically does not matter if the shutter speeds get slower unless you're dealing with wind, water, or other moving subjects. Using large format film, I tend to be in the f22 or f32 range which will always result in a relatively long exposure. Since I know my desired aperture, I like to set my digital light meter camera to that aperture and have it tell me the proper shutter speed. I then use the exposure compensation dial for artistic adjustments such as making sure snow is white or a shaded rock is dark, and I use a little bit of simple math to determine the needed GND filters. If you have a different method you use that is completely fine, as long as you're able to get a good result in the end. To help clear this up for everyone, in the rest of the article I will use some visual samples that show you what my light meter camera would have read while metering around the scene.

Color Positives vs Negatives

I wanted to make a quick note about film types here, for a more in depth look take a look at my film choices article. Color positives (also called slide or transparency film) will give you a positive image with the real colors that you saw when shooting the image. Color negative film (also called print film) will give you a negative where highlights are dark and shadows are light and the colors are all inverted and wacky. You then invert negative film during scanning or traditional darkroom printing. The main differences for the sake of this article is that color negatives (like Kodak Portra or Ektar) will give you a significantly higher amount of dynamic range, or the amount of contrast the film can handle between extremely bright areas and the darkest shadows. While they can handle a huge amount of contrast, they will have softer colors than slide film. Slide film (like Fuji Provia or Velvia) has a very narrow dynamic range and must be exposed carefully, but the results are an image with incredibly rich colors. For that reason, there may be different times you would want to use positive vs negative film and you would likely want to meter them differently. I will also add that color negative film will get less color saturated as you overexpose it, and you can gain a little additional saturation (at the cost of some extra grain) by underexposing it a bit.