Do you/ should you , use a separate exposure meter ?

obajoba

A good 3-5 exposure bracket works great for HDR. While I am not a huge fan of extreme HDR images, using HDR to properly expose shadow areas while not blowing out the highlights can be a wonderful thing (emphasis on 'can')

Msmoto

When I use auto bracket I usually use about 2-3 f/stops difference. The sensor on the D4 has an incredible amount of latitude.

MikeGunter

Hi all,

First, unless I will apologize up front if I come off as old and disgruntled. I just got back from the dentist.

Second.

Well, all of you use light meters every time you use a camera. You can not not use a light meter every time you engage the shutter. In digital cameras, you can't turn them off, even in manual mode they will report the exposure in the the EXIF data. You can't ignore it if you look at the LCD screen; it is the indication that guides you to increase or decrease f-stop or shutter speed.

I suggested a art student get a light meter for her particular work in night photography for ambient night shooting as it would be a better tool for gauging that work, and I still believe that. I also believe that students need light meters to learn how to measure light with meters and setup their shots with meters to make them better composition-ists.

They will, in the fullness of time, understand the inverse square law as it relates to light, come to an awareness greater than what the human eye can sense to what sensitivity is in f-stops - it is terrific.

I rarely use an external meter - perhaps 2% of my shots, much like Ade, when in a mixed shooting environment, but it is very useful knowledge and powerful knowledge to have.

That is a huge difference from 45-50 years ago when 50% or more of my work was external metering.

And as an afterthought - to Paperman - if there were no meters in cameras - how would they operate? Literally? The LCD couldn't report any image. The meter has to be there to capture the image - the meter is part of the process.

My best,

Mike

DJBee49

The truth of all this is, I think, that it depends upon what you are doing.

I never use an external meter when I am out and about, shooting found pictures in the street, family snaps, most documentary situations, found objects, macro, architectural exteriors (mostly), rarely for landscapes etc. I always use the excellent in-camera systems.

However, for architectural interiors, studio work, setting up portrait lighting, measuring lighting ratios and many other situations, I rarely use anything else but my lovely Minolta IVF meter and put the readings in to the camera on manual. It measures incident and reflected, flash and ambient, spot and average and a whole lot more. Yes, I could use histograms, bracketing, trial shots, guesswork (HCB did!) etc. but why on earth would I when I can get it absolutely spot on in a few seconds with a hand-held meter? Shooting an interior for instance, where you have to balance ambient light from windows with a lit (or sometimes unlit) interior, with reflectors, fill-lights, with the camera on the tripod .....is it not better to travel around the room with the meter, mapping all the different areas, lighting them accordingly, adjusting lighting ratios and then putting that information into the camera manually? I suppose you could do it with the camera meter but it would be very cumbersome and take a long time.

Gitzo suggested that cameras from the 50s to the 90s did not have in-camera meters that were of any use. I don't think that is really true. They may have been a bit basic compared to the all-singing-all-dancing meters in cameras these days, but they seemed to work OK. Nikon F Photomics, Minoltas, Pentax, Olympus OMs (lovely cameras), Mamiya 645s and many others all had perfectly adequate metering systems I think. Sinar even had a very clever meter for their 4X5 and 10X8 cameras that measured from the ground-glass screen. It was very expensive though!

Even if you never take on photographic work such as the examples above, I would still maintain that the ability of a hand held meter to educate the relative beginner is, in my view, unrivalled. I still learn from using mine!

Msmoto

My Nikon F Photomic T never worked worth a darn. Always used incident metering and then adjusted according to the subject. But, any light meter reading is only a start. Even the very good matrix system in the D4 requires one to understand what the final image desired will be. I often use +- up to a stop or more when I am shooting.

paulr

I use a Sekonic L758DR in a studio environment. It not only gives exposure readings, it fires the Mono bloc Heads so that I can determine what is artificial light and what is natural light and what % I want to change things around to suit the situation.
Plus it profiles precisely to your camera. I also use it with manual lenses especially when I want spot readings. Its sometimes interesting to see the difference between what the camera says and what the light meter says, however they usually quite close , it's just when you are trying to set a lighting situation up, that you need better control when you are trying to do something different.
Light meters in todays cameras are very good, however if you need that extra edge I do believe an external meter can sometimes make a difference especial;y when you are trying to break the Rules on lighting.

I was once taking readings outside with my camera on a tripod when a gentleman came up to me and asked me why was I using a Video camera to film my camera so I politely put him right.