Remember last week I said I wanted to get an incident light meter and that I found this one on eBay and was thinking about bidding on it? Well I signed up for and eBay account and placed a couple bids. The auction was set to end this morning at 8:30 AM. Late late last night I entered a bid of $20.35. There was another bidder that looks like he buys and sells a lot of camera equipment. He had a maximum bid entered of $20, so I felt pretty smug that I bid so smartly and so late. If I had entered $20 he would have still been the high bidder because he entered his bid before mine.

So while I was waiting for the Deep Impact space craft to crash into the comet I was doing a little more reading-up on the light meter on the web. It turns out that this light meter is NOT an incident light meter, but a reflected light meter. Snap! The light meter inside a good SLR camera is an reflected light meter, so this hand-held one would not really be much use to me. But I did some more looking and they still make the meter. Most places sell it for something in the $80 range, with just a few places selling it in the $60 range. People that reviewed it said it is a good solid light meter at a good price. OK, I wasn’t going to feel too bad if I ended up winning it. I might actually find a use for it or just have fun playing around with it. After all it is only $20.

Well I'm off the hook because some else came in and bid $20.85. And I just looked again and there seems to be a little bidding war going on. The auction closes in 3 minutes and the price is up to $31.01.

The auction just ended and the winning bid was $41.

It looks like the big names in light meters are Sekonic (Japenese and the brand I was bidding on) and Gossen (German). From what I can see their lowest priced incident light meters are in the $140 range. I found this one on Amazon though from a company called Paterson for only $55. I did a few quick searches for some user reviews and didn't find any yet, but maybe this will be what I end up getting.

The Difference Between
Reflected Light Meters and
Incident Light Meters

A reflected light meter is designed to expose your film so that the overall tone of your picture is equal to Kodak 18% neutral grey. This is an image of a Kodak 18% neutral gray reference card.



These three pictures are of a white plate, grey plate, and black plate and a reflected light meter was used. Notice how the plates all look about the same shade of grey. Also notice how the color of the fruit is distorted in each picture.

White plate


Grey plate


Black plate


The reflected light meter measure the light that is reflected from the subject you are shooting. An incident light meter measures the light BEFORE it hits the subject, so it is not influenced by the darkness or lightness of your subject. As a result your pictures will look more like what your eye sees. If it is a very light object it will appear light. If it is a very object it will appear dark. With a reflected light meter everything is brought to the same shade of gray. Here are the same three plates but exposed using an incident light meter.

White plate


Gray plate


Black plate


Pretty cool, huh? The white plate looks white and the black plate looks black.