Light meter calibration revisited

/35 Comments/in , , /by

Over time I’ve written a lot of articles on the use of the light meter, and also some about the calibration of the meter. This has fueled some discussion and also made some people doubt their methods even more than before, so I thought that it was time for a revisit of this topic.

 

Why calibrate the meter
In fact you are not calibrating the meter, but the combination of the meter and the camera/lens combination.
Remember that every camera can be different, and that if ISO100 is correct it could be off for ISO200.
Knowing all this makes it easier to understand why the meter out of the box is not 100% accurate.

 

The quick and easy way
I’ve been experimenting a lot with the calibration process and found that if you calibrate to a QPcard101 and get the numbers to read app 128.128.128 for the gray patch you are pretty accurate. However there are some things you do have to realize.

Read more

Some more from Carmen

/6 Comments/in /by

Today some of my favorite shots from the workshop we did with Carmen last week, I already shared the X100 shots, but I also loved these, and these were shot with the Leaf Aptus, light : one Elinchrom Quadra

Read more

Sekonic module for Elinchrom and more

/29 Comments/in , , , , /by

Today a very special video.
First of all it’s the topic of the video.
For years I’ve been using a light meter and to trigger the strobes I’m using a second sky port (or Pocketwizard) to trigger the strobes and meter the light, however this is of course not perfect. Sekonic already has modules for pocket wizard, but somehow there were no Elinchrom compatible versions so I always carried the second sky port with me…

 

Until a few weeks ago someone got me an interesting piece of gear.
It’s a module that you place in the Sekonic light meter and you can not only trigger the strobes…. but you can do more, for that you have to watch the video.

 

The video is also special because it’s the first video in the “The DOORhof is always open” series.
This is a new videopodcast we are working on and will see regular releases, most videos will be short news, tips/tricks items but once every 4-6 weeks I hope to release a longer videopodcast with a guest and some interesting topics. Because this is the first video I ask you to be gentle, we will learn along the way :-). I want to give my deepest thanks to Aletta Armee for designing the intro and bumpers, you rock.

 

For more information about the DIY module read on:

Read more

Carmen rocks the X100

/2 Comments/in /by

Probably by now you already know I’ve been playing around a lot with the Fuji camera line up. In my own possession are the X10 (which I love as a Point and Shoot camera) and the X pro 1, which in my opinion is one of the best walk around cameras for street photography, it’s not too small to give you the “creepy guy” factor and it’s just “stealth” enough to shoot in places a full size DSLR would be send away, and the quality is…. amazing.

 

The X100 I played with during the last “Scott Kelby Photowalk” which I hosted in Kampen, actually that’s were I fell in love with the looks and feels of the camera, however the fixed lens did stop me from buying the X100 at that point. At the moment I have the whole line up in front of me for testing purposes and I decided during the workshop with Carmen that it would probably also be fun to shoot some images with the X100… today some of these images.

Read more