Hum,(posted 8395 days ago)My computations tell me that you will be looking for:
Shutter = 15 minuits Fstop = 1.4
My assumptions:
MCS = Meter Candle Second (about 10 MCS = 1 Foot Candle Second)
Direct sunlight is about 8000 foot candles, thus about 80,000 MCS
You are looking for 0.008 MCS or about 1/10,000,000 of the sunlight for one second.
Full sunlight at ISO 100 reads about f 16 and 1/100 second.
Reducing this figure I get about 15 min exposure with a f 1.4 lens.
As far as using your meter as a flash meter you will need to look for.. gulp f 0.05 .. something your meter will not tell you.
You say that you want to determine your exposure on the toe of the film, where the film is just starting to respond. I would suggest you meter on the shoulder of the film, and use the step tablet to reduce the exposure for the toe. If the step tablet has say 20 steps each of 1/2 stop then it has 10 stops. This would mean that you could use 2^10 or 1000 times as much light. Then you would be requiring about 8 MCS and that would only be 10,000 times less than sunlight. This means that when your flash meter is set for ISO 100 speed flim you should see the flash meter say about f1.4 to expose the sholder.
Hope this helps
Ken