get rich
get rich
Go into mass production and continuously make improvements.
Following up on this thread. I received my Reveni spot meter about a month ago, and after some comparisons and tweaking used it (successfully) yesterday. I am not going to review it, but found that it worked as expected with very similar readings as my 35 year old Pentax spotmeter. Many of the shortcomings identified above were removed during development.
I just wish they hadn’t removed the rounding reminder in the latest sw version. It’s effectively a whole stop only meter, or else I need to mentally compute things if I set it to 1/3’s stops, which I really don’t want to do during a sunset when things are rapidly changing.
So I’m back to my trusty Sekonic.
It's in Canadian dollars! Not as if it were real money!
Xiggy
Based on what? Are there other options like this we are missing?
Brian
Flickr Home Page: https://www.flickr.com/photos/alanklein2000/albums
Sure. First let me say that this may not apply to others, this is just my own metering flow combined with trying to be particularly accurate when I shoot slides when light conditions are quickly changing.
With my Sekonic spot meter, when you enforce a given aperture, e.g. F22, say you get a reading of 1/8s of a second and a reminder of 4/10ths. So now you know that you can set the shutter to 1/8s and adjust the aperture to a bit passed the first submark in your shutter (I'm assuming here you have a shutter like a Copal that shows markings in 1/3 steps between the nominal 1-stop apertures). Easy peasy. If don't do this type of adjustment, you are at risk of exposing up to 9/10ths off from where the meter tells you (not a good thing particularly with slides!).
Since V4 of their SW, the Reveni spot meter stopped showing this reminder. The idea was that the SW added the capability of metering to 1/2 and 1/3 stops, so it would seem that having a reminder is obsolete. But that's not the case for my metering flow. If you set it to, say, 1/3s stops, then you will get the time needed to expose in 1/3 of a stop, which obviously you cannot set on your shutter. So for example, the meter will tell you 1/80s but you can only set your shutter to 1/60s. So now in my mind I need to convert back that difference into an aperture difference. It's not complicated math but it's the last thing I want to be doing when the light is rapidly changing.
One approach is then to shoot in 1/3's but in shutter priority, and let the meter pick the apertures for you, which resolves converting shutter speeds that are not possible. But that's not my flow. Right? I want to specify the aperture because I know what it will take to keep things in focus for a particular scene, and I don't want to iterate or change modes or guess the exposure time.
Another approach is to use the EV reading as a rounding reminder. For example, say you take a reading of EV 11.4. In 1-stop mode, the meter would give the shutter/aperture pair for a rounded down value of EV 11, so there is a +0.4 rounding remainder left over (in half stop it rounds to the nearest 1/2, and third to the nearest 1/3). So basically you could set it to whole stops and then just adjust the aperture by at most +/-0.5 based on the EV reading. This would seem to resolve the problem, but there's a catch. If the EV reading ends exactly in .5 is it rounded up (ie. a 10.5 is considered an EV of 11, such that it would really correspond to a reminder of -0.5); and the rounding is done on 2 decimals, so a 11.49 would display as EV 11.5 but would be rounded down to 11 for the aperture/shutter math. What this means is that you're "exposing" yourself to making significant errors if the readings fall on these boundaries.
For all these reasons, personally I've gone back to using my Sekonic.
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