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How to use a manual exposure meter Is a hand held meter useful? I think so, yes. Even allowing for the fact that a light meter - however expensive - has an IQ only slightly above that of a house brick, it's a valuable addition to most photographers' gadget bags. My personal favourite is my Gossen Lunasix-F, which I've had for
nearly 20 years and still depend on regularly. All exposure meters (Gossen, Sekonic or whatever) have a few things in common. All of them have a dial to set your film speed, which is a good place to start. Most of them come with a white plastic dome, which can be slid on or off to cover the metering cell. With that dome in place, it'll measure INCIDENT light, which is the light falling upon the subject. If you walk up to your subject and point the meter back towards the camera, this will give you a pretty accurate reading. The other kind of metering method is called REFLECTIVE metering, done without the dome. Here, you'll have to point the meter directly at the subject, because it meters the light reflected off it. This is more complex, because not all subjects are equally light or dark - you'll have to think along with the meter, because the meter "thinks" it's looking at a "standard" 18% grey card. This takes a bit of practice. Whatever kind of meter you have, pressing the button to take a reading will usually make one of two needles move along a scale. If your meter has a rotary dial with numbers on it, turn this dial until both needles line up. You'll notice that the dial has two scales - an inner and an outer. By moving the dial, the two scales line up shutter speeds (1, 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, 1/15, 1/30, 1/60, 1/125, 1/250 etc.) with corresponding apertures (f-2, f-2.8, f-4, f-5.6, f-8, f-11 etc.). Whatever the reading when you pressed the button, ANY of these shutter/f-stop combinations will give you the correct exposure. Now it's up to you to decide which of those combinations will work best for the particular photograph you want to take. Need a fast shutter speed for an action photo? Read off the f-stop that matches up to the 1/250 speed - let's say f-4. But what if shutter speed doesn't matter, you have the camera on a tripod and you're more worried about depth of field for a landscape? Again no problem - the answer's there for you: Look up f-16 on the aperture scale - f-16, right? But your shutter speed will have to be 1/15th of a second. That's about it, without writing a photography book! A hand held meter is a fantastic tool, once you've had a bit of practice using it - a rotating scale gives you ALL possible exposure combinations instantly. (Pilots use a similar rotary calculator for time-distance-speed problems - simple and quick)
Light meter info: Gossen Sekonic
Copyright © 2001 by Mike Graham. All rights reserved.
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