We all read a lot of stuff about lighting and coaching the models, and although this still is the main thing of course there is also a part that is often forgotten or is even regarded as being old fashioned or limiting creativity.

Meters
Don’t even start about how many times I hear that using a lightmeter is old fashioned, it’s really weird because almost everyone who I teach how to use a lightmeter never wants to shoot without any more.
Some myths about the lightmeter is that it’s never 100% accurate and that with the histogram you can easily see what you’re doing, well sorry to burst that bubble, the histogram is not correct.

First of all the histogram doesn’t show you the RAW data, it shows you the JPEG thumbnail, for example change the settings in your camera from neutral to for example full contrast and full brightness and you can see that the histogram changes while the RAW file is still correct, so the histogram is not accurate when you want to check your RAW. You can get it very close by setting the contrast to -2 which will mimic the RAW a bit better than the neutral setting, although I have to add that this can change in the future and per camera, which in fact strengthens my point that you can’t trust the histogram…. But there is more.

Lets look at your own skintone and now look at the skintone of your friend, partner or anyone, are they all the same ? No they are not…. So where should your skintone be in the histogram, and were that of your friend or partner ? I guess you already figured out that also here the histogram is useless.

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Part II of the blogpost where I answer your questions.

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