Zone Placement Sticker for Pentax Digital Spotmeter

The Problem: The Pentax Digital Spot Meter is an amazing tool that is extremely easy to use, but it lacks a clear visualization system for placing tones onto Ansel Adams’ Zone System or simply on an EV scale.

The Solution: I created a simple sticker that fits just below the EV readings, making it incredibly easy to align the meter to the tone on the scale.

I printed the template on sticky A4 paper and used an X-Acto knife to cut out the preferred version for the spot meter. There are two versions available: light and dark. Choose the one you prefer.

The word designed above is doing a lot of heavy lifting since I only did the graphical design. The idea was borrowed from the aforementioned Ansel Adams himself. He also used the same spotmeter and created a crude zone scale that he placed under the meter’s own EV scale.

Thanks to the popularity of his three books, this trick is well-known among photographers outside the online community (though I’m pretty sure I’ve seen Nick Carver use one in his meter too).

The only addition I made was to format it in the style of my own templates and add a delta-EV scale, which helps me meter in color negative film since I don’t use Zone System there.

Ansel Adams’ own Pentax Digital Spotmeter as seen in his The Negative book. See citations below for the exact edition and page.

Citations

1. Adams, Ansel. The Negative. Twelfth paperback printing, Little, Brown and Company, 2002, p. 63.