Digital compact camera as light meter - experiences?

[Joffre Swait]

On the Luminous Landscape sight there's an article (http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/s30-as-meter.shtml) by Nick Rains, an Australian photographer, describing the use of a specific digital camera as a glorified light meter. The idea is to get the immediate feedback from the histogram and LCD. Has anyone on this forum done something similar? What film/camera combinations have you used?

A related question: how would one match up a film's response to light with that of the digital sensor?

Thanks for any responses!

Joffre

[steve simmons]

I have seen articles on this topic and one on using a digital camera for composition. I have never understood the logic of either idea. You will have to calibrate the histogram to your film, developer and developing time and printing paper. Why not just learn to use a light meter or learn to look through the gg?

steve simmons www.viewcamera.com

[Andy Jones]

If the question means "Should I buy a compact (or other) digital camera instead of a light meter just for that purpose?" then Steve's answer is appropriate! I recently bought a 4x5 (Ebony45s) and already had a Canon 10D. On my first shots I used the light meter in the classical mode and arrived at exposures that worked very well (Provia100). At the same time I also framed the same shots with the Canon and its evaluative metering was always within 1/2 stop. I will continue to do this comparison, since I usually have the 10D with me and I can easily foresee that it could mean I could dispense with the light meter. The Canon certainly helped in tricky or rush situations such as the sun setting and light conditions changing rapidly. The meter reading and quick inspection of the histogram were extremely helpful. Since I have developing done locally, the experience I went through "calibrated" my system enough to trust the ISO values in the camera as being "authentic" and its meter as being close to the Sekonic at reading light levels. Looking at the Canon images and the film images later, there was close agreement in levels in both tricky shadows and highlights. Haven't tried any other film (Polaroids also agreed with the Canon when I first started playing with the Ebony) but knowing the ISO is accurate and the histogram/metering behavior is predictable are the main items to satisfy. I scan the 4x5s and print them digitally and the tweaks in Photoshop were not large in magnitude and were trying to achieve the same things one would attempt in an analog darkroom.

I guess I'd conclude that if you have a digital camera with a histogram display, it can help. If you already have a light meter, however, it's probably not worth buying the digital unless you have other plans to get use out of it.

Andy

[QT Luong]

If you want to make the type of precise assesment that a lightmeter gives you, you'd need to have a very legible histogram calibrated in fstops, which I think is rare in compact digicams.

[Dave Schneider]

The only thing I have found the compact digital camera ueful for is to check lighting in studio set ups. These compacts are not calibrated to any standards as near I can tell. When I set it to ISO 100 it has no relation to the ISO on my Sekonic meter or to what I get with film. It's only useful for verifying shadow placement and ratios when setting up the strobes.

[Andy Jones]

QT, Given the IF you present, your THEN is spot-on.

However, once you know the relationship between the exposure the camera suggests, your film characteristics and how a particular histogram translates into a useful image (i.e. where the shadows and highlights ( the ones you want to hold) fall in the histogram) you can very quickly experiment with Ev's to see how much shadow you can bring up without blowing the highlights - the histogram is essentially derived from 6 million 1-pixel spotmeter readings (in my case with a 6MP camera). So while they may not be as accurate as the lightmeter in absolute terms, they are nonetheless useful in aggregate when used appropriately - I am still fine-tuning my understanding of how well my film/scanner combination does in shadows/highlights relative to where they are in the histogram, how much I can recover with levels and curves in PS without introducing objectionable noise etc. (I'm already to that point assessing histograms from the camera and their relationship to the characteristics of the prints I can make from the digitsal captures - this fact probably helped me link the camera histogram later to the scanned image characteristics). I see it as a complement to the basic light meter approach, not a replacement and it's certainly not just a "use whatever the digicam says" approach! Are the vertical lines dividing the histogram segments on the 10D related to f-stops? I don't know and I actually don't need to know to benefit from using the histogram! With my Cokin filter system, I can even evaluate the histogram with e.g. an ND grad or polarizer on the 10D - the ND grad compresses the histogram so I can pull the shadows up until the histogram almost maxes out on the right. Like I say, it can help.

Dave, I don't have any experience with compact digicams so can't comment on the accuracy of yours! You found an empirical use for it clearly showing it can be useful without being accurate. I didn't think my Canon 10D would be as close on its ISO as it turned out and would not rely in any way on the Canon until I had done the comparisons I described. However, it works and is consequently helping me get good exposures. I had been contemplating needing a "correction factor" if their agreement had been worse but I wouldn't need it. If, God forbid, my light meter fell off the cliff I was shooting from, I wouldn't hesitate to rely on this Canon, knowing what I do about it and feel confident I would still get pretty good exposures. That said, I still am using the light meter to calibrate the Canon and not vice versa! I'll just use all the tools I find helpful...

Joffre, I suggest you keep using the light meter and classical approach to determine the exposures for your shots and acquire digital images of the same shots for a while and you'll learn how your film rating and digicam rating for nominal 100 ISO (or whatever) are actually related

Andy

[Leonard Evens]

I think I am with Steve on this. I've used a spotmeter for years, and my exposures are always right on. Of course there are situations, when doing transparencies, when the exposure range is just too large, but there isn't anything simple that you can do about that, and the spotmeter will warn you about it.

The only thing I've found a digital camera useful for is scouting expeditions when one leaves the large format equipment at home. One can try different points of view and evaluate the images at home and then come back for a serious shot. In some cases this is more useful than simply using a viewing frame as a scouting tool.

[Bill_1856]

The meter readings from my Olympus E-20 match perfectly with my Metrastar.

[Paul Schilliger]

I did that in the studio with a Fuji S2, mixed daylight and flash, and the settings transposed to film gave good results.

[Andreas Schmidt]

With the digital camera you take your shot, click through the menue, read the histogram, translate that histogram according to your calibration, set your exposure. With the spotmeter, you point it at some points, calculate the difference and set your exposure. Both work, if you got used. Which one is easier for you, I don't know. Under most conditions, I clearly prefer the spotmeter, with the additional advantage of not always having to worry about empty batteries.