fukkin meters, how do they work

ayo dayo

when yr using yr incident meter (I've just "assembled" that iPhone meter per the link), how...do you do that? like if I'm metering, say, the bus I'm on, do I take the incident light on my palm and just go with that?

well you'd have to decide upon a subject first. if your subject is just 'interior of the bus' then you'd walk over to where you want to take a pic of, meter by pointing your iphone to where your camera is eventually going to be, and take the reading.

it's going to require a value judgment - are certain areas of the bus darker or lighter than others? you may want to take separate readings for those areas and see what the difference is, if there is any at all.

be careful of pointing the meter towards the windows - likely the light outside is gonna be much brighter (in the daytime) and will affect the reading. but sometimes that may be what you want, depending on what you're shooting!

you generally use reflected metering when metering off your hand - it's commonly accepted wisdom that a caucasian toned hand is gonna be one stop above 'middle grey' in a picture (which generally looks pretty pleasing, people like it when they look 'luminous'). so if your subject is the people on the bus you may want to do that - you risk blowing the highlights if the windows are in the pic, tho, and it's sunny outside

wait I just confused myself. so if you meter off your hand, open up one stop from the reading you get to place yr hand one stop above middle grey. I think that's right. *ponders*

so per the instructions on that link, you do a spot meter off your hand with your camera, overexpose one stop. then you take an "incident" reading with the iPhone app and stop down the EV until it matches your camera. this "calibrates" the iPhone and it can now be used as an incident meter.

haven't read the post yet, will later

fwiw, i took some shots outside (cloudy), and the iphone generally underexposed by about 2 stops as compared to what the center-weighted reflective light meter in my GF1 wanted (when taking a picture of a dark-ish building). inside, in this airy architecture library, the iphone meter is overexposing by four stops. \(•_°)/

http://www.camerasandfilm.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/71110019-3.jpg

gonna point out that though, that this is a great photograph, but you can see her face falls right in the middle value of brightness in the pic - might have been improved by opening up one stop? this is what incident metering does, though - it puts the thing behind the dome at the middle of the brightness values measured by the incident meter

gotcha...so for portraiture, it might be worth opening up so ppl can sparkle like a vampire in the sun

oh okay his method is pretty simple. take yer GF1, change your metering setting to the one w/ the smallest zone (the one that looks like [ . ]). measure yer palm outside in the sunlight, that'll give you a reading that's +1 stop above middle grey (or IOW it'll underexpose by +1 stop if you set that as middle grey.) you have to add one stop to it to get the middle grey reading for the scene.

use yer iphone in reflected mode (I'm assuming using the back camera and not the front) to take the same measurement of yer palm in the same lighting conditions. adjust the "EV" setting in the app until it matches with the adjusted reading you got from your GF1 in the first step.

yeah or you can just exposure bracket since yer shooting w/ digital, or pump it up in LR afterwards xp

xp right.

and i've got the tape over the back camera, so it's getting an averaged reading

oh okay. well you're using the iphone camera to take the calibrating reading w/o tape first, right?

oh wait am i supposed to do it that way?

well yeah - the calibrating reading should be taken in reflected (i.e. default), since that was what mode your GF1 used. after you calibrate the reflected mode, then you can tape it and use it as an incident reader. I'm pretty sure...

actually the more I think about his method the more I think I may be misunderstanding it. will ponder, busy now

no wait - I think you are supposed to point the tape covered iphone @ the sun. my bad.

so yeah just do what he says in the article. *shrug emoticon*

so guys are there like noted bibles of film photography basics? i've discovered a roll of delta 400 in my drawer (prolly...3 years old?) so maybe it blows but i've got this rollei sl35 sitting here so i may as well shoot it. the battery is dead, so the in camera meter doesn't work, so i'm gonna use that iphone trick and see if it actually works with film.

old 400 delta should be fine; my not-especially-technical approach if i think i'm going to get something washed out is to just push it up anyway, because then you'll get *some* kind of thing going on, rather than the just-washed-out-400-style-pics you fear.

yeah maybe expose at 200 since film sometimes loses sensitivity once it's expired.

my suggestion would be to keep a logbook of your exposure info. maybe bracket to see how changes in exposure affect the negative. other than that, just shoot!

http://www.amazon.com/Photography-10th-Barbara-London/dp/0205711499

This was the standard 'textbook' in my school's photo program - buy an old edition cheap, something like the sixth or seventh edition should be all film (though this covers way, way more than film/darkroom work)

http://www.amazon.com/Photography-7th-Barbara-London/dp/0130282715/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1316896141&sr=1-1

dunno if this is useful to you at all, but I referred to it quite a bit when I was developing my own film:
http://www.amazon.com/Film-Developing-Cookbook-Darkroom-Vol/dp/0240802772/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&qid=1316896204&sr=8-5

thx for the recs man

so I've been dicking around in my yard and testing my gf1 sensor against the sunny 16 rule and it's kind of amazing how well the two match up? also went through a few old photos and sure enough, if I (laboriously) spitball the exposure i can get pretty close (one stop) of the recorded meter value. p cool