Light meter suggestions?

[Alan Klein]

Which is reflective metering and only in ~60% foolproof, especially with wide-angles you’ll have hard time trusting your AUTO everything procedure

Your "only 60% foolproof" sounds like a guess. Most digital photographers don't have a 40% failure rate. If they did, they should take up drawing. You have the added advantage of a histogram and blinkies to show when you're clipping shadows and highlights.

Regarding using these cameras (micro 4/3) as a light meter, I use a 24-70mm effective zoom lens to zoom in to the area I want to read the exposure. I don't use a wide-angle lens. I can switch metering from 2-3 degree spot to center average to matrix. If I switched to a lens with a max of 150mm, I could get the spot down to around 1%. I can set the camera to aperture or shutter priority or manual. So there's a lot of flexibility built into the digital camera, more than a dedicated exposure meter. Of course, you may not want that much flexibility and want to use something more simple. That's OK too.

[Doremus Scudder]

Note of caution with the spot meter.. Unless it has been modified in some way, the meter reading equals 18% gray rendered on film. This means metering a white color object will render/record as 18% gray on film.... not "white" on film. Keep this in mind while using the spot meter.

Bernice

The same applies to any reflected meter. Usually, a meter with a wide angle of view will be metering both dark and light areas and the average will work out to middle gray. This is not always the case. The classic "polar bear in the snow" shot will also fool the meter into underexposing and the "black cat in the coal bin" will fool the meter into overexposing (less serious, though).

But Bernice is right, when using a spot meter you have to be intelligent about which value you're metering and basing your exposure on.

It boils down to the user being smarter than the meter.

Best,

Doremus

[Bernice Loui]

Being skilled, astute and smart using a light meter is the key to Greatly reducing scrap film, Great frustration with difficult film images and more..

How to meter is often an under appreciated yet mandatory making film images requirement.

Bernice

[LabRat]

With a spotmeter for B/W, your "safety" zone (for normal development) to include in the range of film is read the brightest area you want to hold detail in, one stop below that should be middle gray, two stops below middle grey should hold shadow detail, and there is an additional stop below that that will hold some forms, but little detail...

For color chromes, one stop below highlight detail is middle grey, and one stop below is about the shadow detail you will get on film...

Steve K

[Drew Wiley]

Besides the reliability of the meter itself, the next most important thing is to become so familiar with your own meter that working with it is almost intuitive. I started out with a relatively primitive coupled external Cds averaging meter on an early Honeywell Pentax, and almost never goofed even a Kodachrome shot. Later, graduating into 4X5 color chrome photography, I adopted the Pentax digital spotmeter and never looked back. Yes, that had its brief learning curve; but that was decades ago. I use these for every film format, every kind of photo subject, indoors or outside.

The whole problem I have with people relying on the statistical odds of an internal camera program telling them the correct exposure, or them having only that option, is that they often crash land into reality pretty hard once they try to actually print those exposures in the darkroom. Scanning and evaluating neg quality on a screen isn't the same thing. They should stick to a pure digital workflow if that's the case. But they may have gotten into film in the first place because they wanted its own classic look, but don't really understand how the learning curve of film exposure and development needs to go hand in hand with the learning curve of actual darkroom printing. I have friends who fell into that trap.

Black and white films also differ from one another with respect to contrast gradient and potential luminance range of competent capture, so no digital histogram can take all those kinds of variables into account within its own relatively limited range; but I suppose it's better than nothing. Just don't stumble into the Zone System Inquisition when doing so.

[Bill Poole]

Depending on the situation and what I have with me, I will use an older Sekonic meter in incident mode, a Reveni Labs spot meter, or the My Lightmeter Pro ap on my phone, which is always with me and so get quite a bit of use. I find the phone ap to work well in averaging the luminance of a scene. I will also "walk into" a scene and get very close to a shadow area, which I will then meter directly with the phone from a foot or so away--the shaded trunk of a tree, for example. This method gives very useful information, allowing me to expose for detail in those areas. If I had to reduce to only one meter, it would be my phone.

[MILC Toast]

Thanks for all the advice. I think I might buy one of the Luna meters and get an app. That would give me a 3-way cross check.

A little back story, my eyes are painfully sensitive to sunlight. I'm not sure if it's the actual brightness or maybe just one wavelength but I squint a lot or wear sunglasses.

I don't think I'm the best judge of light and brightness but I've never tested that against an instrument.

I intend to learn a lot about film speed, aperture and shutter speed as well as how to use the information a light meter provides.

I'll also experiment with using a digital camera to use its metering abilities.

More and more info will let me see what is consistent, what is questionable so I can learn how to take measurements that I can successfully translate to exposure.

[Daniel Unkefer]

Minolta Meters by Nokton48, on Flickr

I have all of these meters in my studio. Amazingly Minolta Meters have always worked without problems for me. The Autometer II is not at all expensive, and it's my standard go-to outdoor incident meter. The Flash Meter is deadly accurate and compare exactly to my Broncolor Flash Meters. An olde design but works without fail always

[SergeyT]

I'll also experiment with using a digital camera to use its metering abilities.

The main advantage of a digital camera is that is provides a histogram along with highlight clipping indication.
Other benefits
- it allows to assess color temperature of a scene. Not precisely but at least reliably indicates if a warming\cooling filter should be used and approximately how strong it should be.
- it allows to keep reference images of the photographed scene. Could help with color correction of final images on film.
and the list goes on.
I never used a dedicated light meter, never felt like my photography would benefit from using one . Instead I have a feeling that it may only complicate things for me.

[Alan Klein]

The main advantage of a digital camera is that is provides a histogram along with highlight clipping indication.
Other benefits
- it allows to assess color temperature of a scene. Not precisely but at least reliably indicates if a warming\cooling filter should be used and approximately how strong it should be.
- it allows to keep reference images of the photographed scene. Could help with color correction of final images on film.
and the list goes on.
I never used a dedicated light meter, never felt like my photography would benefit from using one . Instead I have a feeling that it may only complicate things for me.

As I mentioned, I'm using a digital camera as well. While the histogram helps me, there are a couple of issues I'm still investigating.

First, histograms and clipping blinkies are based on the jpeg, not the raw image. So the camera is already affecting the range you see. Second, is that the digital camera has more stops before clipping than film does, especially positive slide film. So what may not be shown as clipped in the digital camera's histogram or blinkies, might get clipped on the film. So I've been giving a 1/2 stop less light for slide film rather than shooting at the exposure shown on the digital camera. If shooting negative film, I'd add 1/2 a stop.

The 0 and 255 points can be changed in my camera so that the clipping area is less (for example I can set the range of 5 to 250). The problem is I don't really know where the right point is to match the film's range in DR. Maybe other here have an idea of how to calculate that?