How to use a light meter?

Alright, welcome to a quick tutorial on light meters and meter reading. You don’t need anything expensive when it comes to a light and flash meter. You just need something as going to measure your light and your flash. Most light meters are relatively the same. There are few things that you need to key in before you actually take your meter reading. One of those things that you need to key in obviously would be the ISO that you’re using. You just press your ISO button, factoring your ISO that you’re using for that situation and for a lot, it’s done.

Now, the second thing you need to key in would be your shutter speed. Shutter speed and ISO naturally are very well so you just key in your shutter speed whatever it is for that situation. Once you have those and you take your meter reading the meter watch, they give you your stop output. As you can see here, it says at the ISO 100 at the time of one sixth of a second that the light is F8 that is what following other subject. That is what you want ti input into your camera in all those settings and that would give you a proper exposure.

Okay Meters. I've got the Minolta and I've got the Sekonic. Like I said, they both pretty well do the same thing especially when you turn them on. So, Metering is relatively simple. Like I said before, just key in your ISO, you key in your shutter speed, press the button, pop the layer as you’re doing the ambient light, it gives you the start.

We’re going to do this scenario right here at present. Okay we have our main light and we’ve got a background layer. Now, with metering you know you hear ratios all the time four to one, two to one, join as you bring ratios to do it by ratios occasionally.

I don’t even bother what ratios are. I find it very confusing when we got into them. What we usually go by the desktop. So you know I usually go into a 3:1 ratio whatever. I don’t know what that means. I know my main lights are fit, my film light would be at four and I know that. That’s where I'm going to speak with. Let’s just first meter. You know, if we were going to meter this scenario here, let’s meter the main light. I have to turn off all the other lights. Alright, and just meter the main light.

It don’t matter which meter I use. I'm just going to use my Sekonic here. I could set up the mode to nine cord which means I'm metering it without a cord. So what I do is I press the button and the meter would wait for the flash to pop and then give me the mirroring meaning I had to have some of the trip it or I have to trip it with the flash.

But we have a cord planted right into here so that’s exactly what I’m going to do is I just want to plug it into my meter. Now, I’m going to set the ISO for 100 because that’s what ISO we’re using and then we’re going to use the shutter speed of what? What do you use for purchase? So I'm going to set the shutter speed to 125.

Now, about the subject, there are some people whose meters are having the dome pointing at the camera. Some people have to point it at the light source. I pointed at the light source. The reason being is with Digital, I like to expose for the highlights. I don’t want to need highlights blown out so I'm going to know exactly how much light is heating the highlight side of the face or where that light is going to hit.

So all you simply do now is just likewise they don’t radiate the light and I’ll pop it up. and I've got mindset for non cord which means is flashing and did mark so I’m just going to set this to cord so there we go, alright, and pop and let this work again. You know what? I may indicate the cord and there we go.

So I've got F8, and as you can see this little takes on mine. I've got it eight and a half actually. That’s what terrific. So I’ll do it again, I've got F8 and a half again so if I was going for F8, two things I can do. I can lower my stroke down or I can pull it back. I'm pretty particular about my exposure. I'm actually going to brought it down just a little bit. Now, it’s in here.

Actually, I should explain the edge transfer to move your light ahead that. Okay, John’s going to explain edge transferring. I’ll just explain that. Edge transfer is get your main light and you move it back to transfer between where your highlight is and your shadow so you speculate a highlight in your shadow. The transfer becomes a little bit softer.

Now, if you want to say get a little bright you want extra hot stuff if you move your light in, you’ll get extra half stuff, and this shadow also becomes a little bit harder so if you want to maintain that softness to the transfer, you adjust the light intensity rather than adjusting the distance.

Alright let me see here. There I got to fake them, so that’s the main light. This is what I set the camera too. If I was just, if I was exposing right now, and have my camera set for ISO 100, 125th of a second at F8, that’s what this is telling me right now. I've got F8 especially when it works.

If I move my subject over here, I did it and I’ll get 5 or 6, big difference. Alright there we go! So now, next is the background light.

Now in the background here, we like to have it about the same as the main light. We now have the background light on there. Now, if I'm going to take a meter here, here I've got 2.8. It’s got a 2.8 on here which means if I was to just take this image without my background light on, my background would be very dark. You wouldn’t really see it because there’s a two stop difference that being for the main light, 2.8 for the background, so I’ll just take this light on.

But I think 0.2, that’s fine. I don’t mind having a little bit dark and on the same thing for the whole. I’ll plug that in right now. I'm just going to turn around for this and I'm going to block my main light a little bit or I'm just going to vary from here. There you go. Lights are kind of half which basically what we want for our highlight.

So now again, I'm exposing for the highlights, my ISO put right now is set on my main light at F8 and that’s what I'm exposing for F8.

Now, you might think any of the light. Okay we got a lot of ambulance for the breaking here. Well you know what? It’s not as break to affect anything. If I was to set this to ambient and do a metering reading on ISO 100 at 125, I'm getting one F1, not even enough light to even affect the exposure at all. Some would read about that a lot but we do as we meter each light individually.