Hand held meter

[Ben1]

Hi all,

just wondering if anyone here uses a hand help meter with their xpan, instead of the inbuilt meter???

I was thinking about purchasing one for my landscape work with the xpan, but im kinda unsure as to what to buy. Any reccomendations?

Im also curious to know what the hand helds can do/tell me that the inbuilt meter cannot??.. Maybe more effective at balancing/averaging subject brightness ranges?

Im guessing it could be a pain, mainly coz you gotta pull the thing out every time u wanna shoot a pic, but if it means i will get better results then i am quite happy to do this..

Thanks for advice
Ben

[Toby]

A handheld meter will not, in itself, improve your photgraphy. What it can do is help you understand and interpret lighting conditions so that you can set the exposure that most suits your visualisation of the picture.

There are of course, many types of hand held meter and I'm assuming you are referring to incident meters. Incident meters can help because they measure the light falling on to a subject, so the colour or brightness of the subject has no effect on the exposure as with reflective metering. The disadvantage for landscapes is they only measure the light where you are standing not your subject, because it is too far away to make that practical in many cases.

You may find a spot meter more useful for very wide vistas, as you can meter from small parts of the scene and build up a comprehensive picture of the contrast and brightness in different areas.

[Joe Henry]

I have a hand-held light meter, but rarely use it wih the XPan. Point the camera down a bit to make sure the sky is not in the picture. This is the exposure setting that you want. This will eliminate the chance that all that bright sky could fool the meter.

Joe

[Finder]

I always use a handheld meter. I have a Gossen Luna Pro SBC with a spot attachment and a Minolta Spot Meter F. Both are excellent meters. Both are easy to use. I use the Gossen more because it gives me incident metering and reflected metering for 30, 15, and 7 degrees. It is also more sensitive.

And you do not have to meter for each exposure. You just need to meter for each lighting condition. Like most tools, you need to learn to use it and in that way it is no better than a camera meter. I find handheld metering faster and easier to judge than camera metering.

[jgense]

What about the small Gossen Digisix.
Is it good ?

Jeroen