without a built in light meter

[Solinar]

I also think shooting meterless is a great way to learn how/when the simpler meters in many cameras will get the exposure wrong.

Shawn

This is very true on my older cameras, with center averaging meters. There's no AI module to tell the camera when the subject is back-lit or the background is a field of white.

 

[shawn]

The problem with that is, you will only find out what your meter readings mean in relation to what your images look like - by using film and seeing the results. There's no getting around that, and it still means practicing.

Yes, I meant checking your initial estimation against the meter is a good way to check the accuracy of your estimation. How that relates to the image itself you need practice to develop visualization.

If you don't know how accurate your estimations were (at least at first) you don't know if your resulting image is due to a bad estimation or a bad interpretation of how the scene will be recorded based on that estimation.

Shooting digital meterless (and checking against a meter) and chimping is helpful to practice this too due to the immediate feedback. But digital you will want to err. on the side of underexposure and film is the opposite.

Shawn

 

[kshapero]

The OP writes like Dr. Seuss! Yes I would, could and have used meterless cameras. My first serious camera was an Nikon F. I didn’t know what I was doing at the time and bought a spotmeter. I used my hand in place of a grey card and when it became inconvenient I started guessing exposures based on sunny 16. I was mostly shooting TMX and after a while was able to correctly guess within half a stop. When I bought an N60 AF body I completely relied on the matrix metering. I have gone back to meterless cameras but rely on a Sekonic incident meter. In a pinch I can still give a good guess. Once on a shoot the batteries in my Pentax Spotmeter died and my trusty back up the 308 also had dead batteries. I checked them the night before. I left my iPhone in the hotel so had to wing it. All the shots came out fine. It’s a good skill to have. I was shooting a supposedly haunted hotel believe it or not!

Personally shooting "naked" is a great learning experience. Once taught Photography 101 at a community college. Each student was given a Pentax K1000 to use. First thing I had them do was to take the batteries out, so they could really think shutter speed, aperture and ISO. Course evidentially evolved to DSLR's but the beginning part really taught them the basics.

 

[Dan Daniel]

One thing that helps, if you're using a handheld meter: Try to predict what it might be before you take the reading. Is it full sun? One or two stops less than full sun? Three or four? With experience, you can come pretty close and that's a good skill to have for the day you forget to bring the meter.

Yep! Another thing to do is to have a notebook and write down the exposure you use for every frame. Then when you develop the film, go through the negatives and the notes to see what actually happened. If you do this for 2-4 rolls, you'll be set for life.


And I do believe that physically writing on paper is much better for this type of learning than punching things into a smartphone.

 

[Godfrey]

Even when I have a meter in the camera, I tend to set exposure first then look at what the meter sees and judge/adjust the settings to suit. Keeps me in practice.

With a meterless camera, daylight settings (open ground, shady ground, etc) are all easy. Harder situations (available light in low light, dusk, night scenes), buy and have a Kodak Pocket Photo Guide handy. Read it, use it, work with its exposure calculators. After a while it won't come out of your bag very often. Easily available from Ebay.

All the evaluative auto-metering stuff in cameras is a great convenience, but by and large exposure settings are easy in most situations. When the situation is not easy, use a meter to read the light levels and then use your judgement to evaluate the correct exposure.

I prefer to tell my camera what to do rather than have it tell me what its going to do... 😀

G

 

[raid]

I am currently carrying in my camera bag an M3 and a Standard Leica. While I carry in a side pocket a light meter , I do not use it. Sunny 16 works very well with print film. It is more fun not to use a light meter.

 

[Dogman]

In the late 1970s, while working for a daily newspaper, I had no cameras with working light meters and I got to be pretty good at guessing exposures. But we used only Tri-X at the time and the latitude was enough to carry me through when the exposures were off. And many of the places I had assignments were familiar since we were there over and over again--city hall, athletic stadiums, jails, hospitals, etc. On my own time, I used the various Kodachrome films but I used a handheld meter. No room for guessing with Kodachrome. I was pretty good at guessing but I wanted to be sure when I used Kodachrome.

 

[raid]

With Fujichrome 50 or Velvia 50 I used to use a digital spot meter at all times. Transparency film is very sensitive to the exposure used. Negative film is more forgiving.

 

[mpaniagua]

Since I do most of my photos on b/w and C41, All my Leica LTM photos are done without a light meter, using sunny 16. I agree with OP, is kinda mystical and refreshing 🙂

On medium format, somehow I always end using an external meter, probably out of habit (since I already carrying a big camera, a light meter barely add any bulk/weight to the kit).

Regards

Marcelo

 

[vagab0nd]

The meterless-metering system I've developed for negative film is:

Sunny 11
Hazy 8
Partly Cloudy 5.6
Mostly Cloudy 4
Cloudy 2.8
and finally for those really dreary days
Cloudy as .... 2

with adjustments for highlights, shadows, back light, etc. Works pretty well as long as I remember to change exposure settings!

 

[drewbarb]

Most of the cameras I use don't have internal meters. I carry a hand-held meter and use it when I have time or feel the need to check my settings. Experience is the best teacher, and especially if you tend to use one film stock or E.I. most of the time it becomes very easy to judge correct exposure. At this point my meter is used as much to confirm my gut as it is to check actual light values. I think lots of us still work this way.

 

[farlymac]

I've been going meterless for quite some time now. I've learned that the two most important factors are properly reading the light, and having a camera with an accurate shutter.

I mostly don't have problems when using a Leica or Nikon, but my FSU gear gives me fits sometimes. Also, I need to remember to either take my glasses off, or look over the top of them as they are auto tinted, and that can throw you off more than a stop when reading a scene. Plus, you only need to read the field-of-view of the lens you are using, not what you see when your eye is away from the viewfinder.

Indoors though, I still don't have enough practice to be confident.

PF

 

[Takkun]

In the late 1970s, while working for a daily newspaper, I had no cameras with working light meters and I got to be pretty good at guessing exposures. But we used only Tri-X at the time and the latitude was enough to carry me through when the exposures were off. And many of the places I had assignments were familiar since we were there over and over again--city hall, athletic stadiums, jails, hospitals, etc. On my own time, I used the various Kodachrome films but I used a handheld meter. No room for guessing with Kodachrome. I was pretty good at guessing but I wanted to be sure when I used Kodachrome.

I'm quite a bit younger than you, but my cohort in journalism school was one of the last to still be taught on film. I had a very old-school professor that insisted we shoot nothing but HP5/TX, learn exposure with a gray card, and later guess exposure the rest of the time. I got to be...okay with it. I also made it hard on myself shooting my final project on medium format and Neopan...

It was a big shock going from that run-and-gun style, to learning LF and zone system in grad school. Nowadays it's a little of both--finessing sunny 16 on small format ( I never trust 'A' mode on my M262), but since I shoot a lot of transparencies on larger formats, a meter is necessary, and not at all slowing me down considering I photograph architecture mostly.

The Bronica kit I inherited came with a metered CW/spot prism, but it was out of commission for a long time. I ended up getting a Sekonic Multimaster with incident and 5º spot mode—not quite as precise as a traditional 1º but hugely more versatile; the iOS metering apps just weren't working accurately for me, but that's likely because I have a very old, and very slow, phone.
Judicious use of epoxy got the metered prism back in service, but I honestly prefer a WLF and external metering most of the time.

To the OP: The Gossen DigiSix and Sekonic TwinMate are both fairly popular clip-on meters, depending if you want digital or needle display, but both require using a calculator dial. I don't know if they still make it, but the Voigtlander meters were great, with a pretty intuitive ISO/shutter/aperture dial system.

 

[Timmyjoe]

If I'm shooting B&W, I'll go meterless. If I'm shooting chromes, I use a hand held meter. I've always found B&W film to be pretty forgiving.

Best,
-Tim

 

[doc68]

When shooting BW negatives, I mostly rely on Sunny16. If I am really unsure, like in "how deep is the shadow under those trees really?", I might use my phone as an incident meter.

Then again, for years I would meter certain situations trying to memorize them, even if I wasn't actually shooting. (My memory has more holes than Swiss Cheese though)

 

[raid]

If I'm shooting B&W, I'll go meterless. If I'm shooting chromes, I use a hand held meter. I've always found B&W film to be pretty forgiving.

Best,
-Tim

Which phone app light meter do you recommend?

 

[CMur12]

I shoot slides and it just never occurred to me not to use a meter.

For 135, I use old manual-focus SLRs with center-weighted average metering. I scan the scene to see the range of light values and I decide from those readings how to set the exposure. This has worked very well for me. It is very rare for me to just point the camera at the subject and center the needle.

For medium format, I shoot a TLR on a tripod in a slow, deliberate manner and I use handheld meters (a Minolta spotmeter and two Minolta incident light meters). I mostly use the spotmeter for landscapes, scanning the scene similarly to my method above or taking a highlight reading and hitting the highlight button on the meter, then deciding how to apply these values. Using a meter seems natural to this approach to medium format, so I have no interest in going meterless here.

My Minolta Autocord CdS-III has an outstanding built-in CdS semi-spot/zone meter (not TTL). I have gotten such good results with this onboard meter that I have never used separate meters with this camera.

There is something attractive about shooting a meterless 135-format camera without an auxiliary meter, but I never had such a camera until recently. I now have a Pentax H1a with no meter, to go with two Spotmatics (a II and an F), so I might put some effort into learning to use this camera with eyeballed exposures.

- Murray

 

[shawn]

Which phone app light meter do you recommend?

I have two I use.

Pocket Light Meter is good. Set ISO and adjust either shutter or aperture and it will tell you the other setting along with EV at your ISO as well as referenced to ISO100. Will also do WB and you can take a picture with it logging exposure info and notes for later matchup to your film image. It can also be used with a Luxi for all for incidence readings.

The other I use is myLight Meter Pro. This one has two different screens available. One like an older 'calculator' light meter and one with a more modern take. The app lets you set lens presents. The presets will limit the max aperture the meter will open to (based on the lenses max) and it also will show you hyperfocal distance for that lens at the given aperture. This also has a reflected and incidence light metering mode. You need a white diffusion cup for the front facing camera if using the incidence mode. This one will also allow you to take a shot with exposure info on it for later matchup.

Either works well. The first is more of a spot meter, the second defaults to more of a matrix meter but can also be switched to spot metering.

Shawn

 

[Pfreddee]

I've used Sunny 16 and her siblings to get some shots, just to keep my hand in, but I reach for my light meter when I am indoors in some kinds of warm light (read incandescent) just to make sure. I've done enough film B/W photos to be pretty good at it, but not cocky.:roll eyes:

With best regards.

Pfreddee(Stephen)

 

[webOSUser]

Unless it is bright sun, I use a meter most of the time.



Steve W