Help me figure out what's wrong with my light meter?

MattKing said:

The other disadvantage of incident light metering is that sometimes you have difficulty getting the meter where it needs to be in order to measure the light incident on the subject - think photos from long distances, for example.

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Yeah. I was meaning to ask about that. For distant subjects like landscapes and buildings, am I right to think that the only option is to get better at using reflected light meters? I'm at the stage that when I go out shooting, I think about how the subject compares to 18% gray, and whether the background is brighter/dimmer than the subject, and uneven indoor lighting.

This weekend I did a couple of trips to a cool indoor location with lots of neon signs and very uneven lighting. I shot two rolls and took some notes on what I did. I will develop the rolls later this week and see how they turn out.

dcy said:

Yeah. I was meaning to ask about that. For distant subjects like landscapes and buildings, am I right to think that the only option is to get better at using reflected light meters? I'm at the stage that when I go out shooting, I think about how the subject compares to 18% gray, and whether the background is brighter/dimmer than the subject, and uneven indoor lighting.

This weekend I did a couple of trips to a cool indoor location with lots of neon signs and very uneven lighting. I shot two rolls and took some notes on what I did. I will develop the rolls later this week and see how they turn out.

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A better idea for landscape would be to diversity your metering toolkit.
For landscapes here in Australia you will see most practitioners using multispot/incident meters.
It is a false idyll to hold out an incident meter when the scene beyond you and the meter has several variations of light and tone! And don't start me on that cute Zone system stuff.
There is a learning curve involved in migrating from incident-only to multispot/averaging with challenging scenes and the expansion of dynamic range of narrow DR films. The natural lighting in Tasmania, for example, changes rapidly and requires great dexterity — mental and physical — to track all attendant changes and influences. So for us, it's always spot/multispot. Incident metering was never my go-to methodology on any format in the landscape genre and still is not; occasional portraiture makes use of multi-incident, but outside of that, definitely not for landscape when the image must be bagged.

wiltw said:

@dcy For your general knowledge and awareness (but do yourself a favor and then FORGET about it for ordinary scene shooting!)

• the flat disk can be used for metering the illumination of FLAT ART
• the flat disk can be used for metering studio lighting to determine light source *intensity ratios* for portaiture illumination setup of lighting contrast
• the flat disk can be utilized for other techniques like 'duplex metering'

For usual scenes, the use of the incident meter is rather simple and free from error, when you apply the very basics of use..

1. put you meter in a area which is at your subject (or in light which iis very similar to that striking your main subject, when you cannot be at your subject)
2. aim the meter hemisphere at the camera lens position, so it integrates what your lens sees, how the light strikes the subject
3. make sure your meter is in the right mode (ambient vs flash)

any more is making it more complex than it needs to be ordinarily.
In comparison, reflected light metering is inherently complicated by meter angle of view, the error due to subjects themselves beeing brighter/darker than 'midtone average', all of which can entail the use of compensatory ways to counter-bias the errant reading.

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Amen…

In the past when organising workshops analog photography the most valuable methode to learn to expose film the best way was to let the participants expose some sheets slide film in the morning and develop them in the lunch break. After lunch we could discuss the result. Even for the most inexperienced person it will be clearly visible if the exposure went wrong. In a group of 10 persons there were always some mistakes. I never found a better way to educate the effects of right/wrong way measuring the light.
This also underwrites my vision on photography. If you cannot see it in the end result it’s probably not relevant for the taking of the photograph.