On The Usefuless of Light Meters In Photography

Last year, Sascha Welter convinced me to trash my digital Nikon D90 camera and get a ‘real’ camera instead, a Mamiya C330 Professional (yeah, that “Professional” tag on the front of the camera makes you feel good but won’t improve your photography skills in any sensible way).

This venerable, sturdy camera was produced from 1969 to 1974 and it makes square (6x6) exposures. It has no light meter, no auto focus and no thousand option menu that requires a rocket scientist to operate. Indeed, this is a wonderful tool for actually taking pictures instead of having to digest a 3000 pages long manual and brag about it in tearooms.

So how would you do to get the ‘light’ right as there is no light meter? Of course, this is not a digicam. So you can’t shoot a picture at every f/stop and hope you get one right. This camera takes rolls. Either 12 or 24 exposure rolls. So every shutter release counts (as in money). The rule of thumb is to rely on the age-old Sunny f/16 or, even better, its expanded version (courtesy of Sascha).

This is how I got started. This is how I rediscovered photography and started really enjoying it instead of worrying about menus, options, RAW vs. JPEG, histograms and every other thing that gets in the way of what should be a simple, straightforward pleasure down the composition path.

After some time, experience kicks in and Sunny f/16 starts to be engraved in your brain. So your “guessing” gets better. But at times, for example in the evening or inside a shop, “guessing” is about as useless as sleeping on the floor, letting your cat get your bed in the hope that Chinese rice will be better this year. Well, yeah you could wait until the daylight with your subject or if you were inside a shop, ask the shopkeeper to temporarily remove the roof.

So I got a Sekonic Twinmate L-208 light meter and took it for some field testing during a recent trip I made to Prague. Earlier this morning, I had the chance to have a quick chat about it with Sascha on IRC (yeah, I know, the cool kids in town use Facebook nowadays). Here is an excerpt of our conversation:

Sascha: don’t you think you would have had the same result with “guessing” in those conditions?
Saad: you want my sincere, unbiased opinion?
Saad: provides a mucho better experience
Sascha: hehe, yeah
Saad: the lightmeter takes away some of the fun
Sascha: the light meter is good for when you run out of guessing, e.g. inside a shop
Sascha: just continue with guessing and use the light meter only when really needed
Sascha: before Xmas I was with XXX at the place of one of her uncle’s - an old dude who used to do a lot of photography
Sascha: when I was measuring in the dining room at one point he predicted what I’d measure - and he was right to the 1/3 stop
Sascha: it’s all a matter of experience
Sascha: if you lived through times when light meters were inaccurate and too expensive to be really available, you’d use a table till you learned it by heart
Sascha: and you’d remember your exposures and thus learned what worked and what didn’t
Sascha: so you got the experience

Needless to say, I agree :-)