Mako, I have the same spotmeter, and I think it's the most sensitive meter available. I did a lot of nighttime work with it for several years, and discovered that although the scale goes down to EV1, the meter actually works for an additional two stops below that. You just have to imagine where the 0 and the -1 would be on the scale, and the meter works down to those values, though not quite as reliably maybe.
Good luck,
~cj
Take a reading off of a white card and adjust your exposure accordingly.
I've had the same dilemma. I use a little digi camera with a histogram display for a guide. Shutter speeds, f/stops and iso need to be adjusted accordingly but it's suprisingly accurate after a bit of experience. And you've got the added bonus of a quasi Polaroid of the scene. I still use my spot meter when it's bright enough though.
Ditto on the Gossen Luna Pro SBC. It's the most sensitive I've found. -4 EV is really all you could possibly need; any darker and your exposures would be over ~8 hours, in which case the sun would come up.
Unless, ok, you're shooting in polar winter or something, but then you're kindof insane.
Just curious: Does anyone make a really, really sensitive light meter (spot or incident) for use in extremely low light?
I have the first Sekonic dual meter, I think is the model 508 or something. On incident metering it goes down to -3 EVs. On the spot I dont recall very well but I think it only goes down to 0 EV. Since I use the incident metering -3 EVs is plenty for me, the darkest place I have pictured was -0.5 EV and that was plenty dark.
The Quantum Calcu-lite XP goes down to EV-7 in reflected mode. I have used it for several moonlit shots where it was indicating its lowest readings, and took successful photographs using reciprocity tables from the web. I don't do a lot of available darkness photography, but I like knowing that the meter is well above its sensitivity floor when the light is merely dim, and that I can use it in incident mode in dark places (the diffusing dome robs quite a bit of light on most meters).
The Pentax LX and Olympus OM cameras had off-the-film metering with a high sensitivity. At really low levels you can just leave the shutter on the LX open and it will close when it has integrated enough light. If you're sitting nearby you can stroll over and put the lenscap back on your LF lens when you hear the click.
Forget bracketing, intuition or other ill fated attempts at metering this situation.
The correct answer is the Spectra Professional incident meter. I can get a correct exposure from the inside of an inner room closet with the door closed and the lights off. It has been the standard tool for the professional cinematographer for many years and has customer support to the nines.
Until Richard Boulware kindly shared this information with me, I had no idea Spectra existed and think that many others like me are in the same boat in an informational vacuum.
Cheers!
The Pentax LX and Olympus OM cameras had off-the-film metering with a high sensitivity. At really low levels you can just leave the shutter on the LX open and it will close when it has integrated enough light. If you're sitting nearby you can stroll over and put the lenscap back on your LF lens when you hear the click.
If I recall correctly, the LX was specified to be good for exposures up to 125 seconds. I suspect that that's an arbitrary number, that the individual samples will peter out at different points depending on sample variation in the components. I've never tested my LXes to see what their limits are.
But it would be awkward to use an LX as a meter for another camera, because there's no readout, not even a predictive one, of the exposure time you're going to get in long-exposure situations - the finder LEDs run only down to 4 seconds, after that it's just an undifferentiated "LT". I suppose you could time the actual exposure with a watch, and use that to calculate exposure for the other camera. So far as I know, the LX doesn't introduce any bias for reciprocity in these LT exposures - hard to do in any case, since films vary so much. You have to dial in a correction via the ISO/exposure compensation dial, based on a pre-estimate of what the exposure will be.
Oren, I have heard of people making exposures of a couple of hours or more on 'auto' with an LX. Never done it myself though, and they may have just got lucky. As you say, you have to have *some* idea of the total exposure to compensate for reciprocity, and you would have to babysit the camera (or rig up a sound trigger) to finish the exposure. The big advantage of integrating during exposure is that it compensates for changes in the lighting levels: round here the moon comes and goes as the eternal cumulus sweep by.
A sensitive integrating meter would be a simple enough electronics project - photodiodes and their controllers have improved a lot since the LX was made. If someone ever made the elusive self-timer/long exposure/IR-remote shutter plunger for LF you could integrate it into that too.
When photographing low light or night time scenes which involve reciprocity failure one thing to remember is that whilst your shadows areas are so dark they fall into the reciprocity region, it is quite possible and infact highly probable that your highlight areas are not dark enough to fall into reciprocity. Also, the shadows will be further into reciprocity than the highlights since reciprocity curves are not linear.
If you meter the shadows and adjust for reciprocity then you push the highlights way up the scale. Assuming black and white film, then you could reduce development to pull highlights back but you will be reducing highlight contrast which may not have been great to start with.
Personally, I would just meter a highlight value such as a Zone VII and only adjust exposure for reciprocity at that reading if necessary. Shadows will fall where they fall which since it is dark is likely to be a lot darker than a daylight scene. Maybe even black!
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