Light Meter Help L-398A Studio Deluxe III

[kalapakiboogie]

Hi, I have an L-398A Studio Deluxe III Light Meter from Sekonic and I have no idea how to use it. I want to use it to compare ratios for lighting and consistency of lighting between shots. I can use other tools like zebras, and waveform monitors for my exposure. I really need some help on how to use this thing properly, the manual doesn't say much. I am shooting 24fps at asa/iso 500. Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks in advance! :dankk2:

 

[j1clark@ucsd.edu]

Hi, I have an L-398A Studio Deluxe III Light Meter from Sekonic and I have no idea how to use it. I want to use it to compare ratios for lighting and consistency of lighting between shots. I can use other tools like zebras, and waveform monitors for my exposure. I really need some help on how to use this thing properly, the manual doesn't say much. I am shooting 24fps at asa/iso 500. Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks in advance! :dankk2:

From a brief look on the web for what type of meter this is, it appears to have both incident and reflective meter capabilities.

I personally never use incident light meters... but then I'm a still photographer...

But for reflective metering, take a reading off the main light side of say a person's cheek, then the shadow side, and check the resulting f-stop values for doubling or halving... ie high light side gives a f/8 and the low gives an f/5.6... there's 2:1 ratio.

Personally I'd use a spot meter for this sort of thing.

You can do the same sort of thing in 'incident meter mode', where you align the incident blub to your 'main' light sorce, then angle it perhaps even 'shading it' to the 'shadow' side of the subject, and calculate the resulting ratios.

Meters are calibrated in terms of a middle grey, aka the 18% grey card... and Caucasian skin is about 2x reflective as middle grey card, where as deep dark complexion is about half as refective, and 'mediterranean/olive' skin ranges between...