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Behold! How Much Light Through Yonder Window Breaks?
English teachers of a certain age will wince at that one, but I take my revenge on the bard where I can. Do not reject these products because of this.
A lot of people have forgotten what a light meter is. Their cameras all contain circuitry for measurement, but they just accept whatever is done - without knowing what it was. I don’t judge harshly - there are lots of times when I give the machine its head and let it be smarter than I am.
But it was not always so - a lot of film shooters rolled from
one end of the exposure problem to the other and needed
all the help they…er…I…could get. We used handheld light meters to get us into the ballpark with our exposures. and it could be a very small playing area with some slide films - we needed to be very close to the right numbers.
So we bought Sekonic and Hanimex and Gossen and Weston and Minolta meters and we learned to point them in the right direction - and that could be fore or aft - and to set the ASA correctly. Sometimes we found out that the film makers were far enough away from us to tell us anything we wanted to hear about film sensitivities - an that wasn’t always the entire truth.
We learned to read the meter needles or lights. We learned to know the biases that the meter cells were prone to, and we compensated. But boy, were we glad we had a meter to tell us what the light was doing when it started dropping or we went inside.
Well, now you can add a very small, very precise, and very cute light meter to whatever camera you have. Silver or black finish, two easy-to-read dials, and three lights to tell you under, on, and over. No needle to fall off the peg. It runs from a CR1632 button battery and probably goes nearly forever.
Clip it into the flash shoe on your film camera and it will look like it just grew on there. This is the perfect excuse you needed to resurrect the film camera - 35mm or folder - that you inherited, and start using it again.
This time, use colour negative film, set the ISO carefully, and shoot with confidence. DO it often enough and people will think you know what you are doing. Hey, managed to fool most of ‘em…
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Images and text by Richard Stein
