Hi guys! So I am finally ready to move away from natural light and get some studio lighting. I have plans for an Einstein strobe, as well as a few Yongnuo speedlights. My question is whether or not a light meter is necessary/extremely helpful for a beginner. If so, any suggestions on reasonably priced ones? Thank you!
Hello Tia,
I teach lighting and always advocate for using one. Here are my reasons for using them. Speed: You can nail the exposure exactly first time, no taking a photo then looking at your histogram, making an adjustment, taking another photo, looking at the histogram, etc. Professionalism: Now this aforementioned process usually only takes a few tries to nail the exposure, however if you have a paying client, it's nice to nail the exposure immediately and not futz around. Studio specific requirements: If you are going to light a background for full length photography, you are going to need four heads to light up your background (or more depending upon the size of your background) evenly. A histogram is not going to show subtle tonal changes created by variation in exposure on the background. Your eyes may not pick it up on the small LCD on the back of the camera until you enlarge it during editing. Ratios: If you know your lighting rations 1:1, 1:2, 1:4, etc. you need a meter to know the difference in exposure between your key and your fill light, and/or the ratio between your key light and background exposure. For instance, if you want a white background to fall off to grey, to make it darker grey or lighter grey will depend upon the ratio of your exposure from your subject to your background. Say you want a pure white background without having too much spill light, you'd want to light your background a half stop brighter than that of your key light. If you are doing simple lighting set-ups and not too concerned about perfectly lit even backgrounds and precise lighting ratios, you can get away with using your histograms. Just be sure that you use the individual RGB histograms (You'll see three separate histograms on top of one another each for the Red, Green & Blue channels) and not the composite (White) one, and be sure to look at the red histogram where skin tone falls primarily, because you can have a composite histogram without clipping your highlights because it is averaging the RGB values, but if you check the red channel histogram individually you may be clipping (overexposing) the skin and losing detail. As far as meters are concerned, I'd stay with Sekonic as they are the industry leader. Their entry level strobe/ambient meter is the L-308S-U that retails for about $199.00. Above that, I'd go for the L-478D-U which has a bunch more features such as ambient/flash exposure ratio for mixed lighting, the ability to turn the head and use different adapters for reflective light reading. You can also get different versions of this meter with a Pocket Wizard or Elichrom transmitters to trigger your strobes from remote while metering.