Between The Sprockets A photography blog

Using a Light Meter

I've acquired a fairly modest collection of various cameras since I started shooting film.  Some of the older cameras are completely mechanical and have no built-in method of metering light.  For a while I simply used one of my newer cameras to help out with metering.  I would set the aperture and film speed the same as the old camera and see what shutter I should be using.  This works fine, but it just felt wrong to me.

While browsing through a 2nd hand shop one day I saw  light meter for sale.  I had see some before, but never this cheap.  Looking back, $12 is a good price, but because it's not digital it's quite easy to find these light meters nice and cheap.  It took about a week to figure it out, but once I knew, I couldn't believe how easy it was.  It looks intimidating, but you'll soon see how easy they are to read.

The first thing your light meter needs to know is the ISO of your film.  On my meter this is set by rotating the clear plastic outer until the mark lines up with the ISO number in the window.

Once that is done, it's time to point the clear end (the light sensitive part) at whatever it is your taking a photo of.  You'll notice the needle on the bottom will move.

Once it has settled, rotate the outer ring until the oval shaped marker is over the needle.  You can stop pointing the light meter at the light source now.

All that's left to do is read the settings.  What you should see is a range of F-Stops lined up with a range of shutter speeds.  You know just pick a combination (depending on which aperture or shutter speed you want for your image) and set your camera.  In the picture above (which you'll note the F numbers and the shutter speeds don't line up completely.  This is ok, you can pick the number closet to the F-Stop you want), I could choose f4 at 125, or f5.6 at 60, or f2.8 at 250 etc.

If you're wondering about the dots between the shutter speeds, these are markers for some older cameras that have settings for (now) irregular shutter speeds like 5, 10, 20, 50 and 100.

It's really not that hard, and using it doesn't take much time.  A light meter assumes you have knowledge of what affect aperture and shutter speed have on your photo, so if you're not sure what they do, you might want to do some reading to get to know them better.

Quick Tip: To avoid camera shake (blurry photos) you should pick a shutter speed that is a higher number than the length of your lens (in mm).  For example, with a 50mm lens, I would pick a shutter speed that is higher than 50 (60 is a more common speed settings on cameras).  As your lens gets longer, you will need a faster shutter speed to stop camera shake affecting your image, eg. 200mm lens = 250 or higher.*