light meter

I dont often hear of people using light meters these days,a friend of mine uses one.
Comments welcome
Regards
Chris

I use one (polaris) as well as greycards.

while trial and error is cheap with digital (or is it? wear and tear costs nothing?)... looking like you 'know what your doing', and 'time is money' both matter in business.

An essential piece of kit in my opinion. I use a Sekonic Flash Master L-358.

If you want perfect exposures every time, and you know how to use one properly, it's invaluable.

When every shot is exposed properly, you don't have to make so many adjustments in PP.

FWIW, I also use a grey card or Expodisk for white balance. That's two fewer adjustments I have to make on the PC.

I have an old Ziess unit that I use from time to time, usually with older film bodies to check the accuracy of their on board meter.

I have an old Weston Meter with Invercone when i first moved over to Digital i would use it frequently but these days i just take a preview shot to make sure that the highlights are`nt burned out so the Weston stays in the bag these days.

Regards - Pete

I use a Minolta Auto Meter 3 for exactly the reasons given by Don always using incident readings - 100% accuracy guaranteed, especially with the extreme dynamic range you find in weddings. I also have the spot attachment but that is rarely used. It isn't as nice as my Minolta Flash Meter 4 which was stolen

Now I get depressed. How do you use the meter then?

One from highlights, one from shadows to give some idea of the dynamic range or do you just decide to expose for the highlights and let the rest sort themselves out?

We'll be back to Ansel Adams zone system in a minute.

Mike

another good reason to own a meter... and a greycard...
I upgraded the (rather pricey) modeling lamps in my strobes to (much cheaper, brighter) halogen lamps.
I shoot video as well as stills. getting the color and exposure of the video to closely match the stills is important to me.
It is also important since my strobe and (video) modeling lights may be set differently than you'd expect, that I am able to accurately set up lighting ratios for both the flash stills and constant video lights off the same units.

Mike it is so much simpler than any of that. By measuring the light falling on the subject you get an accurate reading, rather than the measuring the light reflected by subject which gets skewed by paricularly light or dark tones of the subject.

At the risk of teaching grannies to suck eggs I'll do a short tutorial if anyone is interested?

Yes please, would be very helpful.

I would too as I have forgotten all this. Incident light meters have that cone thingy and are effectively their own white or grey card is that it?

I must dig out the Ansel Adams zone system again as well.

It's 30 years since I thought about any of this and I do find the Pentax metering to be very good provided you keep brain egaged.

I'm intersted...
I build my shots buy first deciding on my ambient exposure...
then adding fill and finally key for my subject...
then the background/backdrop or other accent lights...

for example, typical studio portrait shot:

set up large softbox and meter it by using incident reading, meter dome pointed directly at the softbox from the position of where the shadow will be on the subject. (ie under chin or darker side of face)

I then set up and meter my key light the same way (often using a shoot through for women, or gridded reflector for men/kids) and meter where the brightess highlights hit pointing the meter dome from the subject towards the lightsource...

finally a snooted hairlight metered to match the key light, again from the subject pointed at the lightsource. remember I'm metering each light for purposes of setting up ratios, the key light is my main reading...(note it is where I start from often opening up 1/2 to 1 full stop over the key light reading)

I then take a reflected reading off my background/ambient from the camera position and adjust the backdrop/accent lighting or shutter speeds to control that.

Although the metering is fairly consistent(underexposes)on my K200D,with my MZ30 I have been led to believe that using an exposure meter would give me more chance of getting consistent shots
Thanks for all the comments/interest on this subject.
Out of interest, how much would I need to budget for a meter?
Regards

Chris

link

Don,many thanks for the link - looks like a good place to start for a beginner like me has excellent reviews.

Regards

Chris