Educate me on light meters, please.

Derrel · May 3, 2017

The more money spent, the fancier the meter and the more it can calculate, and the more automatedly it can calculate flash to ambient as a percentage. See the Sekonic company's online recorded webinars for examples of what their higher- end meters can do, instantly, as opposed to calculating in your head.

smoke665 · May 3, 2017

I always find Tim Campbell's posts well written and informative. When I went looking for a first meter I found the price of the high end meters to be out of reach for a hobbyist (when you consider all the other toys on the want list). After searching for a bit I found a Sekonic 308BII for just under a $100. It's a simple meter that measures incident and reflective, as well as flash, works great.

TCampbell · May 3, 2017

smoke665 said:
I always find Tim Campbell's posts well written and informative. When I went looking for a first meter I found the price of the high end meters to be out of reach for a hobbyist (when you consider all the other toys on the want list). After searching for a bit I found a Sekonic 308BII for just under a $100. It's a simple meter that measures incident and reflective, as well as flash, works great.

My first digital meter was the Sekonic L-308s. It does everything essential. I was looking for a low-cost meter that supported flash metering and it matched my needs.

I gave that meter away to my niece (who is also into photography). She was struggling with metering in situations where she had to use flash.

It doesn't let you meter multiple points and then show the average exposure. It doesn't report "flash contribution" when using ambient+flash. But it does provide you all the basic data that would let you work that out on your own.