The Light meter thread

[Brian Luce]

Until there are zebras, I'm thinking light meters are the way to go. I don't own one and never have. So, where to start? I want something cheap and simple. Not the best, just the basics.

[Jon Fairhurst]

The cheaper option is to expose to a gray card. It won't tell you if your shadows are lit or crushed, or if the windows are blown out, but it can help to ensure that faces are exposed consistently, shot to shot.

You can use a histogram to see if the windows are blown, but getting the shadows critically lit is the toughest problem - and where a light meter could come in handy. Personally, I like a waveform for checking out the shadows.

[Nathan Moody]

I also do photography using Pocket Wizards to trigger strobes, so the Sekonic L-358 has served me very well. For videography, I use it to get in the ballpark, but I still use two other tricks to ensure usable exposure on the Canon 7D: I shoot with the popular "superflat" picture style, and I shoot stills with every new setup and with for every significant blocking, to ensure the histogram is happy with the light meter's suggestions. This works for me because I color grade in post and don't mind taking that time. If color grading won't fit in my pipeline, i just follow Stu Maschwitz's "Flatten your 5D" instructions instead of shooting superflat.

[Jon Fairhurst]

One of the challenges with the 7D and 5D2 is that it applies a strong S-curve, and it's only eight bits. So, if you don't get a good match, you end up throwing precious bits away.

Exposing for a correct histogram (no blown whites or crushed blacks) in RAW photos is a great way to go. You can tweak in post, and in general, nothing needs to match. For video, it's really important to get things in the same range from shot to shot - even if you grade for art's sake later.

We've had great results using Magic Lantern and setting light skinned faces at the 0xb000 zebra level. On the other hand, our first 5D2 short was shot in the snow, the light changed all the time, and that was before the manual exposure settings. We used the histogram method to ensure stuff wasn't blown out, but the cuts matched poorly, and we had to hand tweak aggressively, just to get consistency. We ended up with lots of contours on some shots.

This doesn't matter really for travelogue type shoots, where the scene varies from cut to cut. Histograms are fine then. But for narrative, where you follow one character in one setting, zebras or a gray card are the way to go.

[Liam Hall]

The Sekonic L-758DR is designed specifically for use with digital cameras. Personally, I can get by without one.