When photographing a landscape scene with a high dynamic range, is there a way to use this light meter to meter the brightest spot, the darkest spot and the middle tone spot, etc? I saw people use a 1 degree spot meter device, but those meters are about $600 to $700, I can not justify spending this much money for a hobby. I really like to buy this meter, and make it work. Any advice would be appreciated.
Hello. How to measure the non reflected light? So eg. I am standing right under/ beside the object I want to portrait. In which direction I have to hold the light meter? The measuring point is on the left side of the light meter. Should it point to the sky, to the bottom or to my camera place?
Hold the light meter pointing towards the camera. If you point towards the sky you will most likely get an over exposed reading and if you point towards the ground, assuming the ground is dark, you will get an underexposed reading.
So I can use all apature with the shutterspeed? So it doesn't matter if I use a shutter 15 and a apature of 5.6? The numbers that the sensor says make the foto great even on a Sunny day?
Mr. Truth The light meter once it measures the light, gives you, in simple term, a table of aperture and matching shutter you can use for the specific ISO. In other words, the exposure will be the same for any combination you use. Of course, as a photographer, you need to decide if that combination works for your scene. For example, too low of a shutter speed means things will look blurry (but visible in terms of amount of light captured). Also, if you are raking portrait, you may want to stick to lower aperture values if you want blurred background. Also remember that once you have these tabular values, you can experiment by upping your shutter speed by a stop or so just to get a darker image. In other words, the light meter should give you normal exposure values. You can then decide what values you want to actually use or change on your camera.
Sunmy 16 gives you an idea of what settings you could use as an approximation- as in, take the best guess kind of situation. The light meter gives you exact values - in other words, you don’t need to use the sunny 16 rule. However, on the days you forget your light meter, you will have the sunny 16 rule as a backup.
Thats a common problem you will face with light meters. One, apps on phone are not exactly as accurate as the meter itself and the reason is because they need to be calibrated. I have used my android device with popular apps and never got the right results probably because my android device itself wasn’t sensing light properly. Also, using a light meter is not just a matter of point and read, it requires practice. You eventually get a feel of where to point to get the reading that works for your image idea. If you point it towards bright section like cloud, you will get higher aperture, and if you point towards the ground, you will get lower aperture. So you need to figure out what average you want.
Think of the light meter as measuring the amount of light, and then giving you table of shutter and aperture combinations that would give you a normal exposure. The only control you can pre-select is the ISO, and this is because film cameras had a fixed ISO (unless you changed the film itself). Aperture priority tells your camera ‘i’m changing the aperture, you figure out the other parameters’. The light meter is not the camera, hence the idea of aperture or shutter priority is theoretically irrelevant.
