Light Meters.
How cool! But are they really useful when your camera has so much tech?
I’ve never had real setup time on any project I’ve worked on. Never a moment where an actor was off in some room being made up while G&E and camera took the time to accurately measure out where focus should be, get out a light meter and a colour checker and get everything perfect.
Digital technology seems to have done away with time, full stop. It’s just expected that you turn on the camera and hit record! Why would you need to set up? The camera does everything for you, “can’t you just autofocus?”.
It’s very sad. We spent a long time in our lesson exploring how a light meter might work and it became clear that one of the reason’s it’s extremely useful is when you perhaps need to recreate a specific look somewhere or match a very specific light level.
Hypothetical Scenario One:
Say perhaps you have an actress bathed in sunlight from behind at sunset with no real fill light, you don’t want a silhouette so you need to fill that actress. Conveniently, you know what f-stop you need to hit due to the sky behind her and the level of sunlight in her hair. If only you had a LIGHT METER!!
My mind wandered as it usually does in class when discussing technology if there was a light meter that could measure incident colour temperature. This, in my opinion is much more necessary in the digital space because,
Hypothetical Scenario Two:
You might be shooting in a very specific room with a really beautiful differentiation in colour temperature but then find yourself in another room of a different building that needs to feel like the same house but it’s all wrong. It’s just wrong.
A light meter that was smart enough to tell you how to modify the light you’re currently using to match something else would be amazing. Also I was admiring just how expensive they are and then I discovered something a little bit magical, Lumu.
It’s just so brilliant. It even tells you what your colour temperature is in fractions of CTO or CTB if you want. It’s just genius.