Old habits die hard (or is it new habits come easliy?)

[siverta]

Lately I've been trying to get my negs more uniform.
After watching a bunch of documentarys about photographers (photojournalists and portraitphotographers), I've discovered that they almost always use lightmeters with that white dome-thingy - I don't remember what they are called.

Recently I have bought a cheep sekonic lightmeter that I use before I start shooting.
I measure the light in the palm of my hand, and I stick to that until the light changes.

My negatives seem to be more uniform, and easier to print. If I use the in-camera light meter, negatives seem to dance all over the place and are abit harder to print.

This technique is a bit hard to get used to, because the in-camera lightmeter doesn't always agree with what my in-palm-metering says. It takes alot of dicipline NOT to adjust the shutter/aperture to what the camera suggests :bang:

What kind of light measurement technique do you use?

Sivert.

 

[pvdhaar]

I used to have a lightmeter that had a translucent white window that allowed me to measure incident light (Gossen sixtino). Currently I use a very simple Hama that does reflective light metering only. I point at something middle grey, measure and use that. It's more consistent than metering every scene through the lens with a built in meter, as it is less likely to be fooled by differences in subject reflectivity.

Oh, and the white dome is often referred to as an 'inverdome'.

 

[PeterL]

lightmeters with that white dome-thingy - I don't remember what they are called.

Incident metering: the light that falls into the subject (in-cident), as opposed to reflective metering.

I measure the light in the palm of my hand, and I stick to that until the light changes.

I've done this with the in-camera spot meter in complicated situations as well. Works fine. Now that I'm using a hand-held meter, I usually measure the light in an environment once and just shoot on manual until the light changes. This gives very uniform negatives if the environment isn't too complex (i.e. if it's sunny-16 weather, then I shouldn't be photographing people in the shadow of a tree or a building. Another example is a long room with a small window.)

This technique is a bit hard to get used to, because the in-camera lightmeter doesn't always agree with what my in-palm-metering says. It takes alot of dicipline NOT to adjust the shutter/aperture to what the camera suggests :bang:

Put your camera on manual and use exposure locking. And build up strength in ignoring machines trying to distract you, it's an important quality these days.

 

[Andy K]

I use incident metering, and yes, you do get much more even results with much better shadow detail.