Measuring light

It's Friday so after last weeks post and a meal out we are going back a little to the origins of this blog.

The start point of this blog was Photography to which other things got folded in over time but one thing that is really useful is a seperate light meter because ever since the early 1980's intergated metering in the camera has moved on from traditional centre weighted systems to more advanced multi-zone matrix metering, spot  metering systems systems the thing that gets overlooked in camera PR material is they're all set to assume what is reading represents a  18 % mid grey and often what it sees is lighter or darker than that.

What that means is that if you were to rely on your own cameras metering it's likely to produce a picture that's too dark or too light and while print films are more tolerant of errors, slide film can only tolerate at best about a half an f stop and the sort errors we can get can be 2 f stops  and that's fatal.

By using a basic seperate light meter, set to match the film speed setting you take a reading of what light is falling on your subject or place say a 10 x 8 gray card (Kodak made a lot of them) in front of it and after turning the dial set a matched shutter speed and aperature on your camera knowing that will be right.

This Russian one uses a selenium cell so needs no batteries (Yay!)  and fits in a pocket where  it'll get you out of a hole.