lightmeter tutorial

[juju]

hiya,

my fiancee just bought us a Gossen digipro f lightmeter. i dont know the first thing about lightmeters but i wouldnt mind trying it out tomorrow when i take some portrait shots. can anyone explain the basics of what to do with the meter and exactly what its telling me to do with the camera please

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[Digital Matt]

Are you going ot be shooting with strobes or with available light? This meter is an incident light meter, which means it reads the light falling on the subject. The meter in your camera is a reflective light meter, and it reads the light reflecting off of your subject.

In either case, the meter is calibrated to reproduce 18% grey. The incident meter should give you an accurate exposure to render a grey card correctly exposed. All other tones in your scene should then fall into place respectively. I don't have this meter, but my guess is that you can calibrate it, and a highly recommend that you do so, by metering, taking shots of a grey card, and comparing the shots on a computer with histogram.

The meter will have several modes, much like your camera. There will be an aperture priority, and shutter priority for flash and ambient. With the meter in aperture priority, you set the aperture you want to shoot at on the meter, and it will give you the shutter speed. Vice versa for shutter priority. When metering flash, you'll need to press the meter button and then test fire a flash to get a reading.

[patrickt]

If you google "photography+light meter tutorial" you'll get some resources to read that are undoubtedly better than what I could write.