Tag Archive for: light meter

All people that …… are ……. WORD!!!

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Must be the weirdest title I ever used for an article.
You can fill in the blanks yourself, but let me start by doing one that I wrote this article about.

 

All people that don’t meter are stupid……
And before you explode and start mailing me, please read on.
Every week I get a few mails from people that have seen me using a meter and they are always in 2 camps. 1 group will try to convince me that they love the work I do but advise me to stop using a meter, the other group wonder why there are so many people out there on the web, on youtube, on training sites etc. who still struggle without a meter.


It’s no secret that I love to use my meter, in every workshop there is some attention to the meter and how to proper use the tool. And there we go already please do remember that the meter is just a tool. In the end it all boils down that we tell a story with our images, move people with our images or/and make something interesting for other people to enjoy, endure or love. That’s photography. Using a meter is just a tool to get to that end result.

 

First things first
Don’t read this as if I say that you shouldn’t use a meter, no way.
I strongly (and really read STRONGLY) believe that if you’re into photography, and you don’t even have to be a pro, you will have to use a meter to get accurate and constant results. I really don’t care if people say that they get great results without meter, my answer to them is “you will get there quicker and probably even get better results when you DO use a meter”. But in the end, and please do remember this…. you can make shitty images with a meter and great work without. But let’s look at some things I want to clarify.

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About the light meter in a quick overview

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On August 12th I joined Scott Kelby during his great “Light it, Shoot it, Retouch it” tour.
If you didn’t already see it, and it’s close to you, make sure you check it out… You’ll love it.
Anyway, during my piece of the seminar I choose to do the high contrast light setup using a deep octa and strip light, during the setup I of course also talked about the use of a light meter and explained some of the theory behind it, however after the seminar I got so many questions from people who never used a meter to people who had problems using one that I decided to dedicate a blog post to it, because really honest… using a meter is like the simplest thing you can do within photography.

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Calibrating the Light meter, some quick notes

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Somehow this topic always raises a lot of questions so I’ve decided to dedicate another blog post on it.
In this blog post I will give you some pointers and tips how to calibrate the light meter.

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Building a solid foundation

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This weekend we had a nice discussion during one of the workshops about being creative and using all the tools like light meters and color checkers.

 

Somehow a lot of people now a days are only trusting their instant polaroid on the back on the camera, we have grown to know as the LCD display. This LCD display indeed shows you an image, and a histogram and of course shows you were the image clips in the blacks and whites, so what more would one need ? Well as mentioned some times before on this blog the histogram is highly inaccurate because it’s based on the JPEG tumbnail that is part of each RAW, but it’s also based on the settings like contrast and brightness which have no influence of the RAW files. Same goes for the color temperature. As explained in a previous blog post the use of the light meter is of vital importance to get the “diffused value” correct, or in more simple terms, make sure the “brightness/skin tone” of your model to be correct time after time and under different situations.
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