>Many thanks for taking the trouble to reply to my post. I have had lots of
>responses about the usefulness of spotmeters for landscapes, ranging from
>"spotmeters are essential" to "spotmeters are useless". I have recently
>purchased a Pentax spotmeter, and following the advice of many who replied
>to me, will, for the next few films anyway, record full exposure details,
>in addition to bracketing. using both matrix metering from my in-camera
>meter and multiple spot readings from the Pentax meter. Hopefully, this way
>I will learn to predict more accurately what exposure range the films I am
>using will tolerate, and what the exposure should be, for given light
>conditions.

Hi-- In addition to the above, I would try shutting down the matrix metering,
using center-weighted metering pattern with manual exposure, and calibrating
the camera meter to the spot meter on middle grey in daylight (by adjusting
the ASA on the camera), using a film other than Velvia (actually 40) to start,
and, when metering, placing a range of tones within the large circle in the
VF that is representative of the tones and proportions in the final photo - I
would bet that that camera exposure will agree with a careful spot metering
virtually all of the time, unless lighting conditions are very unusual.
David Ruether