Re: light meter

That's a hard question to answer, in sum: to capture the image in such a way to manipulate it in post.

It's somewhat subjective, so I hope this makes sense. Price is definitely a factor. Light meter v. monitor v. zebras--they're all tools, but regardless there needs to be some way to measure the light. In my opinion, anyone who takes photography seriously will carry a light meter around with them, for a while, because it'll fit in your pocket, just to see what's going on. I learned a lot one day walking around Muir Woods, in the dappled light.

Anyway...

I use the Panasonic AG-HVX200, so it's somewhat limited in its capabilities: 8-bit DVCPROHD. So there's almost zero margin for error (or rather, there's a lot of places it can go wrong!). Here's how I construe it: The manual says the HVX200 needs a minimum lux of 100, which is 10 foot candles (on my Sekonic L-398A) @ 325 ISO -- an f-stop at 1.4. I set the aperture at 2.8. (If I have to open up more than that, I boost the gain instead due to the lens causing a fuzziness.)

Unfortunately anything between "no light" and 10 fcs gets gunky. I get the room ambient light to 10 fc = 0 IRE = f/1.4, which to the naked eye is actually kind of bright.

Using Apple Color to manipulate the image, my goal is to get a clean "gradient" from black to the second stop (f/2.0). I use the luminance curve in the first room of Apple Color to achieve this, almost mimicking a log curve.

I also shoot a lot of golf, and I hate it when they wear hats. I meter under my own hat, and set the aperture accordingly. Pretty straight forward there. As the sun moves, I check the meter, now and again.