Picking up from where I left off last week's overview of the most abundant films currently in production is this sprawling ramble about metering techniques for film. Analog film and digital sensors capture various aspects of the color and light spectrum in very different ways, so it's good to know the different between the two and how to exploit their respective strengths.
Modern digital sensors can capture and retain an ungodly amount of useable information in the shadow areas of a scene and, generally speaking, color negative and true black and white film can do all sorts of wonderful things with highlights that are well beyond the reach of digital sensors. Keeping this in mind, I have two general approaches to metering any given scene, depending on which hammer (I mean camera) that is in my hands as well as the overall look and feel that I am trying to achieve. Film? I meter in the shadow areas to make sure all details in the darker realm of the light spectrum are captured before pressing the shutter. Exposing for the shadows usually pushes the highlights to near "unusable" realms, but color negative film has much more gradual transitions between highlights to blowouts that you can kind of let the highlights do what they want.