Shooting film with completely mechanical cameras from the 60s and 70s means I need something to find out the amount of light and what exposure settings I need to dial into the camera.

The most basic way to do that is to use the sunny 16 rule, which states that on a sunny day you can set your aperture at f16 and the time to 1/filmspeed (so 1/400 for 400 ISO). This works fine in summer, but on an overcast day you have to guess. And to use another aperture you have to do math to convert the time, which I'm not good at.

A lightmeter solves this problem by measuring the amount of light with a sensor and displaying the correct aperture and time combinations. You only need to put in the film ISO and point it in the right direction. They started to put them into cameras in the 60s, but the first camera I have with a working one is from the 80s. Which meant I needed a separate one.

The first meter I got is the one on the left. It was my dad's and I found it in a drawer a couple of years before I started doing photography. It's a Sekonic L-8, which was introduced in the late 50s. The sensor is a selenium cell and it is directly coupled to the gauge, so no batteries are needed. I used it for about two years, but one day it stopped working.

This was a bit of a problem, so I got the meter in the middle. The Minolta Flashmeter IV is an impressive piece of microelectronics from the 80s. It has all the features you would need in a light meter, including being able to trigger flash and sending the data via IR to select cameras. It does have a couple of downsides though: the buttons are quite confusing and it's quite bulky. Most importantly I only have the attachment for measuring incident light.

The way you have to use it is to hold the meter in front of the subject with the white sphere facing outward and measure the incoming light. This in contrast with the Sekonic, which measures the light being reflected into the camera. Measuring incident light is very useful in a studio environment, but not so much when doing street photography. I made it work by measuring the light behind me, but it wasn't optimal.

When I got back into photography this year the Minolta meter was bugging me, as it was the most cumbersome piece of kit I had to use. Therefore I got a new meter this week, the Sekonic L-208 on the right. It's quite small, has all the buttons it needs and can measure reflected light. As an added bonus it was manufactured and calibrated in this century. It works like the L-8, but with a modern shell and sensor (though it does need a battery).

When writing this post I took the L-8 meter apart to see why it broke. I found out that a metal plate on the gauge shifted, blocking the needle from moving. After shifting it back to the right place it worked again. To see if it was still accurate enough I checked the result with the new meter and they were close enough. I started the week with one working light meter, and now I have three.


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in reply to @mifune's post:

these r so cool - i've tried lightmeter apps on my phone but i feel like my camera is too shitty to really get solid results out of them. should keep my eyes open for a good physical one like these guys!