NONS Instant Back: Exposing For Instax Square Film

As stated in the last NONS Instant Back post this product is a win for me.

Not for everyone, but right up my alley.

I only had one issue. The film.

Not the IQ. That is great. Far better than I expected, if I am honest.

There was one issue, however. Exposing. You have to nail it. Blowouts and shadows alike are nonrecoverable. The sole downside of this whole experiment.

Today I took a bit of time to work out how I could diminish exposure errors. My usual thinking is that incident metering is more accurate than reflective metering. But that has not been my experience with Instax film so far but with a twist.

What is the twist? Normally I would use reflective metering to expose a scene from the camera’s perspective. But that has not been consistent either.

With this method, the intended subject, the statue, is not exposed properly. So a hybrid approach is needed. For example, this is an early pic I took today using incident metering over the Ford emblem.

Now here is the same scene using reflective metering aimed directly at the Ford emblem, rather than the whole scene.

Spot on. Here is the same image cropped to the image square.

Nice.

To test this method for consistency I took a few more pics using the same method. Reflective metering aimed directly at the subject rather than the whole scene or using incident metering on the subject. Had the good fortune of happening upon a vintage Chevrolet which made a perfect subject. Good thing since the old Cadillac I was intending to use down the road was long gone.