incident v.s. reflective meters

[chat_sirichanvimol]

I'm looking into purchasing my first light meter. I'm planning to do

about 60% outdoor landscape and protrait work, 30% indoor protrait,

and 10% action/sport. Is there any advantage to have an incident

v.s. a reflective meter? Should it be spot or ambient?

 

Thanks

[lex_jenkins]

Read Bob Shell's comments here on metering. It's more authoritative than what 95% of us could say:

 

http://www.bobshell.com/cgi/bobstalk.pl

 

FWIW, I have two incident meters and a Pentax Spotmeter V. I generally find the incident meters handier, faster and more accurate for my style of metering and photography. The spotmeter is occasionally essential for very tricky situations, but not nearly as often as I'd anticipated.

[h._p.]

Incident metering is usefull only when you have a meter that can do it properly. The Weston range with their Invercones are the cheapest meters I've come across that seem to meet that requirement. They're fairly cheap second hand or you can still buy them new from here...

 

http://www.megatron.co.uk/euromaster2/

[graphicjoe]

Chat,

 

There are several ways to go. Over the years I think I�ve gone all of them, trying to save money, or otherwise compromise on my needs. I recently purchased a Gossen Starlite, and now wish I had bought a similar meter a long time ago. I would have saved money in the long run and would have had a top quality meter the whole time.

 

My suggestion�if you are serious about photography�would be to give serious thought to getting one high quality meter that does everything: flash, incident, reflective, or spot. That way you are ready for every situation all the time. You will be able to average, use the Zone System, calculate fill flash, balance lighting for all sorts of studio work, and almost anything else having to do with light and exposing film. In the long run you will be ahead of the curve and you will have one aspect of your process control that you can rely upon. Does your work deserve less than the best?

 

As to brand, there are lots of good choices. When I was shopping I found several threads here that were very informative and helpful.

 

Cheers,

 

Joe Stephenson

[richard_cochran]

<cite>Should it be spot or ambient?</cite>

<p>

Whether it has spot capability or not has almost nothing to do

with whether it's ambient or not.

<p>

Ambient simply refers to meters that meter continuous light,

as opposed to flash meters, which meter the quick bursts of

light from a flash. Almost every meter does ambient light,

though there are a few flash-only meters. There are many

ambient-only meters and many that do both ambient and flash.

<p>

Spot, of course, refers to the angle of acceptance of the

meter. Some spot meters are strictly ambient,

while other spot meters can do both ambient and flash. I'm not

aware of any flash-only spot meters.

<p>

What meter, if any, do you have built in to your camera?

And what do you want to accomplish with a handheld meter

that you can't accomplish with your camera's meter? Are

those indoor portrait shots done with studio flash?

[craig_bridge]

With modern meters like the Sekonic L-358 you buy one meter with several attachments and use whatever works best for a given scene.

 

With outdoor landscape work, you might not be able or want to walk up to an area you want to meter so a 1 degree spot meter is handy but you have to judge the tonal placement. With outdoor portrait work, incident readings are helpful so you don't have to judge individual tonal placements. Flash metering (both incident and reflective) are useful because it is the only way to measure anything related to what the lighting is going to be. Different methods for different situations.

[david_h._hartman]

I recommend an incident flash meter first unless you are into B&W and Zone System then I�d go for a Pentax Digital Spotmeter. Ultimately I�d buy both an incident/flash and a spot meter.

 

Bob Shells the Man, check out his site!

[al_kaplan1]

The Weston with the incident converter that they call an invercone is my number one choice.

[roger c]

If you use a lot of slide film, an incident meter is preferable for most work and gives very accurate exposures without worrying about subject reflectance [1]. However, for landscape work where the subject may not be in the same light as you are, a spot meter is what you need (and some skill in identifying an 18% grey area of the subject!)<p>[1]in about 1% of cases you might want to compensate, e.g. a polar bear in the snow needs slight underexposure to capture any detail at all.

[larry_miller7]

Chat;

The Weston meters are a great route to go. Particulary the Master V, the Euromaster and the Euromaster 2. These are very reliable with slide film.