Introduction to hand held light meters

Two varieties of light meters are available for those who want to measure the light in a given situation. The internal light meter that is built into your camera is enough for the most part, particularly if you're an amateur and don't require a high level of precision. They give a fairly good result in some cases, but in others, you get those darker than normal photos that can annoy you.

If you're a professional, a budding professional, or a self critical amateur, then probably a hand-held light meter is what you're looking for to make that little difference in your photographs.

If you've never used a light meter before then this introduction to hand-held light meters may be helpful to you.

Hand held meters offer you some benefits that you may not have considered. This is true because it will measure the light that reaches the object you're interested in, rather than just the average of the light in any given scene or frame.

Your built in camera meter may not be extremely useful for situations such as taking a photo in a very light area, or a very dark area, such as may take place in high sunlight, or a darker room where your subject is wearing darker clothing. Photographs will come out with a great deal more detail in them if you're using a hand held light meter in a situation such as these.

Weddings are a great example of situations with lots of very bright (wedding dress) and very dark (grooms suit) subjects. An internal meter is easily confused by this situation.

To correctly use the hand held light meter, you will need to know a bit about the settings of your own camera. Particular settings that you're going to need to know how to operate are the shutter speed and the aperture settings, and to do that you'll need to understand what they measure.

Just for your own information, the aperture is where the light enters the camera. The smaller the opening, the larger the number, and the reverse of course also holds true.

The shutter speed, on the other hand, tells you the amount of time that the light is permitted to reach, or display, on the the internal workings of the camera, or the film that it contains.

The fractions that you see on the shutter speed are fractions of a second, so if you're seeing 1/50, or 50, it means that the light is going to be permitted inside for 1/50th of a second. A faster shutter speed means that you're going to get quick snaps for action shots, but that it isn't really going to permit enough light inside to make the photo as bright as you might like it.

You're going to need to turn off all of those settings that are automatic to your camera and select a shutter speed and aperture on your own. If you're using an automatic setting, the camera will select those settings for you, regardless of whether or not the image may be improved by manual settings.

Getting the exact amount of light that you want is a matter of how long you let the shutter stay open and how wide an opening the light has to enter.

To use your light meter correctly, set it against the object you're going to be photographing, and you're going to get an accurate reading of where the shutter speed and aperture should be set.

• When the hand-held light meter is facing the object to be pictured, you'll get a reading that gives you the light that is being reflected off that object. Reflective reading
• When the meter faces away from the object, the measurement tells you the light which is falling from the object. Incident reading.
  

Once you have the aperture and the shutter speed that you are going to need to photograph a clear image of your object, you'll need to set both of your settings for your camera.

The use of a hand-held light meter can help you immensely when the object in your view finder seems to be less well defined. If the contrast isn't the way you'd like to see it, or your photos are consistently less defined and clear than you'd like them, then most likely you need to invest in a hand held light meter for your photography endeavors.