Silverbased

I often shoot with old meterless cameras, pinhole cameras, and weird homemade flash setups–all needing some way of measuring the correct exposure. So I just wanted to show a few of the light meters that I’ve found useful.

Sekonic L-398; Voigtländer VC Meter II; Soligor Flash Meter

The Sekonic L-398M is the 90s version of a classic incident light meter design that goes back about 60 years to the original Norwood Director. The main “improvement” of the M version seems to have been printing the number scales larger (which we over-40s do appreciate). Out of several light meters I own, for some reason this is usually the one I grab first. (Maybe it’s because of that easy-to-hold football shape.) Its main weakness is not being very sensitive in low light.

One subtlety of an incident meter is that you point the dome at the camera, not the light source. The 3-D shape of the dome weights the light coming from different directions in a way that yields a good average exposure for 3-D subjects.

This is the style of light meter that Hollywood considered the standard for decades—if they trusted incident meters to get their million-dollar stars properly exposed on film, that’s good enough for me. A version of the 398 is still in production, although now they’ve replaced the (theoretically toxic) selenium cell with a silicon version.

The Voigtlander VC Meter II was an appallingly expensive splurge—especially considering how tiny it is. You see my little loop of monofilament fishing line, added after the thing tumbled out of a camera hot shoe one time too many. It’s definitely the sleekest, smallest way to add metering to a vintage camera that lacks it. It’s also quite accurate in low light.

I have two beefs with it: One is that the ISO dial is way too easy to bump and nudge away from the correct setting. I eventually had to stuff some little plastic shims under the dial to add friction—a rather annoying design flaw considering the price. Beef number two is that the f/stop dial turns steplessly, but the shutter speed dial is click-stopped. Considering that I often use this with 1950s cameras having odd shutter speeds like 1/25, 1/300, etc., I would have preferred either no click stops, or for the aperture dial to have half-stop detents instead.

Also, I found it a little unintuitive that the light reading registers at the moment you take your finger off the orange button, and then stays held in memory as you twist the dials to try different exposure combinations. But once you understand that, it works fine.

There are many fancy digital flash meters on the market; but if you’re a guy like Vox who plays around with tupperware flash or softboxes made from roof flashing, or you would feel ridiculous checking your flash exposure with anything so high-tech.

The Soligor flash meter is one I nabbed off of eBay for… uh, seventeen dollars or something. This model is much more widely known under the Wein brand name; but I’ve seen variants branded as Singer/Graflex, Honeywell, and Soligor too. I love the totally garage-y, analog, project-box aesthetic—you don’t quite believe this was a real commercial product; but I’ll be damned if they aren’t still selling them.

The sensor element is in the white dome at the middle of the knob. This is actually the old version, where twisting the knob changed the meter sensitivity for different film speeds. The current models have a lame system where the needle indicates the f/stop that would be correct for ISO 100; then there’s a calculator dial which translates that to the equivalent f/stop at different ISO speeds. Maybe they had some trouble with the sensitivity pot getting dirty and causing inaccurate readings? But functionally, the old direct-readout style was much more sensible.

I’m not sure I trust its accuracy to much more than about a stop; but if you’re trying to get exposure in the ballpark with a mix of weird diffused, bounced, slaved, yard-sale strobes, this thing is a godsend.

A version of this originally posted on Flickr, 28 December 2007