Topic: How much does the meter lie?

[Steven.]

So i was out doing some shooting and was using sunny 16 for most of my shots. i popped out my lightmeter after a bit and it said to expose @1/640 instead of the 1/2000 i was set at before (based on sunny 16, i was using tri-x pushed to 1600 in sunlight @f/16).

thats roughly, what, a full stop difference?

should i trust my meter or stick with sunny 16?

[Late Developer]

Neither. Both.

Take a roll of identical shots taken twice - one photo at sunny 16 and its twin using the meter. Record which is which and see which comes out best and most consistently. If it's sunny 16, I suspect your meter might be a bit dodgy as a meter should get it most right most of the time - especially if you use an incident meter (i.e. measure the light falling onto the subject) rather than a reflective reading (light reflecting off the subject).

Just my two penneth.

[Steven.]

i was using my iphone meter and its actually very accurate normally... i mean i guess most films i use can withstand a -1/+1 stop in exposure but i still think its odd haha.

[LT]

where are you in the world Steven?

Many northern/ southern places (globally I mean) don't get bright enough sunlight for sunny 16 to work.  I think we had a recent thread on this, but at the risk of repeating myself, I find sunny 16 always underexposes, so I use the sunny 11 rule instead.

Also, urban locations will have added sunlight filters with pollution etc. so again, the f16 rule will underexpose .

Also, sunny 16 doesn't really cater for subject brightness range differences, which differ with conditions, shade/ vs bright sun and so on. A meter reading will read all values in its scope and provide the average of them, which sometimes is not best exposure settings to make.

As LD says, why not try both and see which you are most happy with.

 

[sapata]

I second Leon...

Most of my shots using the sunny 16 in UK got underexposed, and they're all taken in the city. On the previous thread some people mentioned about how accurate the shutter is working depending on how old your camera is.

[Phil Bebbington]

I must say, my iPhone light meter is all over the place. I always take incident readings using a hand held and have never had a badly exposed shot.

[Francois]

And even meters, depending on the type of cells that they use, will age differently. There's also the issue of batteries with older type meters.

Best thing to do is compare a bunch of meters and figure out which ones are the cause of the average deviation.

[Steven.]

i live in san francisco, ca, usa. i never really thought about things like pollution and stuff so that would make perfect sense. i guess i will just have to take Late Developer's advice and shoot a couple rolls and see which comes out better. thanks guys.

[Urban Hafner]

I actually discovered that Sunny 16 is only easy when you're out in the "open". When you're between skyscrapers or in the old town where the streets are really narrow you might be easily fooled and underexpose by 1-2 stops. So when in doubt just expose a bit longer

Urban

[Ordinal]

The iPhone lightmeter that I have has caps on it for exposure time, and isn't very good at extremes. I've never had it cap due to too much light, but then I've never shot at those ISO speeds in daylight! I've had it cap at the bottom quite frequently though.

I find that it's good for situations where I'm in shadow or indoors but not sure how dark it really is, but I'm gradually learning rules of thumb anyway which are more efficient and work just as well most of the time. For street photography in daylight I work out sunny 16 then put it down two stops, or three if it looks overcast. If there's a lot of shadow in the frame I put it down another stop. Indoors, at least five stops. If it looks noticeably dark, enough to make me think "hmm can't see very well" I put it down as far as I can.

Actually, when I'm doing exposure manually on the street I'm usually using an Olympus Pen (the first one, not the EE) which is half frame so I can bracket without worrying about running out of film anyway.

[This-is-damion]

my meter often lies.

Then leon reminds me how to use it and it behaves again.