Yearly Archives: 2012

Pocket Light Meter

Software

A flashback.

When I take my boy for his karate lessons I invariably wander down the street and peek in at the camera store on 25th Street in San Mateo. It’s one of the few left. I’m not sure how they survive in the age of Amazon and online comparative shopping, but I invariably gravitate to the several display cases full of consigned used photo gear. Most of it is 35mm SLR film hardware, of little interest to anyone, and rarely seems to change between visits. I would guess that most sales are to photography students forced to use film by crank teachers who failed as photographers. There are a few interesting 4×5 sheet film cameras and the usual gamut of tired lenses, but the display which always catches my attention, for some reason, is the one with all those exposure meters.

It’s pure nostalgia. I used a selenium cell Weston Master V for several decades, even having the cell replaced by Quality Lightmetric in Hollywood when it died, and my Leica M bodies invariable sported a selenium cell Metrawatt MC or cadmium sulphide MR clip on meter which coupled to the shutter speed dial, requiring only that the indicated aperture be dialed in. Despite their small size these worked well, as long as you treated them gently.

Now every new camera comes with exposure automation built in, yet go the the Apple iPhone AppStore and what will you find?

Note the old time Sekonic exposure meter icon.

From the unattractively named Nuwaste, complete with typographical errors and a broken developer’s site link, comes the Pocket Light Meter app. And it works really well.

The meter can be used either with the front or rear facing camera in the iPhone and is close to a spot metering design. This means it meters a small part of the image, so if you are hoping for an overall averaging of the scene this is not for you. Indeed, an appreciation of dynamic range and an ability to determine whether you want detail in the shadows or highlights are required skills to make proper use of this tool.

You can see just how small the metered area is in this screen snap:

The red rectangle defines the metered area.

The cut-off around the red rectangle is so-so; it’s not razor sharp like, say, in the semi-spot meter in a Leicaflex SL of yore, which had the best manual in-camera meter ever made, but drops off steeply within one rectangle’s worth of the periphery. Not bad. Best of all, just touch the iPhone’s screen and the measurement rectangle will jump to the touch point, so taking multiple readings in a couple of seconds is trivial. Readings take under one second to stablize and touching ‘Hold’ freezes them, though the developer could usefully add an indicator that Hold has been enabled. So aficionados of the Ansel Adams Zone System, where you measure and determine the dynamic range placement based on your selected tones, will love this.

It gets better. Dial in the ‘Display additional info’ option and you get:

Additional display option.

You can see the selected area’s brightness in Lux and FootCandles, as well as EV readings at two ISO settings. Many sheet film camera lenses came with EV settings which, once you get used to them, are pretty handy as they permit locking of the shutter speed/aperture combination, so if you change one, the other changes to compensate. Great for tuning in just the right depth of field. Sadly no color temperature display option is available, which would make this a particularly useful tools for cinematographers seeking color balance betwen scenes.

The intrusive advertising can be removed by sending the developer $0.99. Otherwise the app is free.

Though the specifications refer to reciprocity correction, (correction for the non-linear response of film emulsions at low light levels), I could determine no such feature. The aperture range is f1 – f/512 and shutter speeds run from 32 seconds down to 1/8000, regardless of ISO. The ISO range is 6-102,400.

I tested this app on my iPhone 4S against the meter in the Panasonic G3 and it was in exact agreement under a variety of lighting conditions, including daylight, fluorescent and incandescent light. The developer says it works on the iPhone 3GS or later and all iPad2 models. I tested sensitivity to be down to 1/2 second @ f/5.6 at ISO320. Not Lunasix territory, but not bad either. The Gössen Lunasix meter’s claim to fame was that it could measure exposure by the light of the moon! The meter was about the bulk of five iPhones …. By comparison, the Panny G3 blows away both, easily measuring down to 20 seconds @ f/5.6 at ISO320!

At the price asked, anyone needing manual exposure measurement should not pass this by, so long as you make the effort to learn how to use a spot meter in the first place. The developer should consider adding a center-weighted or averaging option to make this app more broadly useful. But it’s a lot cheaper than even a very well used Weston Master, Sekonic or Lunasix.

Fringale

Dining

A spot of France.

Fringale, at Fourth and Brennan in San Francisco, is not your common or garden lunch joint. It may be in a grotty area, but the prices are strictly top dollar and the fare is high quality French. So much so that I was too intimidated to ask for a beer, fearing I might be chucked out on my ear for such crassness.

Click the picture for the site.

I wanted to keep things light – meal and check – so opted for the Salade Niçoise, my crackerjack French pronunciation somewhat smoothing the waters, earlier ruffled by the appearance of my tired Levis. That’s a nice slab of medium rare tuna atop.

The service here is outstanding, the very French proprietor charming and the whole thing comes with a white table cloth feel in a light, clean interior.

Prices are high, especially when you add $10 for a small glass of wine.

Not my regular sort of place, but a nice change for those days when I make a bit of coin in the markets. Too bad about the beer, though I did luck out with a nice street snap right after, inspired by the tuna salad:

Protests, politics and milestones. Fourth near Market Street, SF. G3, kit lens @22mm.

Missing in 2012

Photography

What’s not to miss?

The author’s alter ego, searching out picture opportunities as ever. In Carmel. G3, Oly 9-18 lens.

I expect 2012 to be a great year for picture taking, which means I’ll be sharing my opinions, experiences and prejudices with you in this journal as much as ever.

But there are some topics which will continue to be absent from these pages, and they include:

Politics: Any field which attracts the least able, provides no return on time invested and wastes hundreds of hours of the average citizen’s time is most certainly not one for me. I’ll leave the US system of ‘One dollar, one vote’ for debate by those less able.

Religion: Life is too short to debate how many angels fit on the head of a pin. I like the tax exempt aspects of the religion business, but I’m strictly a deathbed-conversion type. Just in case. When there’s a 50/50 shot and there’s no downside to losing, take the bet, like Blase Pascal did.

Economics: Technology and the sciences fascinate me. This is neither, and makes love a relatively logical and predictable field by comparison.

While these three fields of endeavor provide a decent living for many, I have never known any to help me take a good picture.

Thus this journal will stick to its three primary dictates. Photographs – mine and those of others. Lots of both. Photographers, through the mention of books I have enjoyed and by the publication of the work of fellow enthusiasts, movies included. And Photography which spans the gamut of gear talk, technological change and computers as they relate to the topic.

It has never been cheaper, easier or faster to take and disseminate pictures. When this blog started you still had to wait for Kodak to return your slides by USPS (can you think of a more inept pairing?), a costly, slow process fraught with risk. Now you use a three ounce cell phone and upload your snaps to a web service for the whole world to see at negligible cost. Unsurprisingly, Kodak and the USPS are both going out of business.

A new year beckons, so it’s prediction time and my list of worthless guesses follows:

  • I will cease publishing exposure data with my snaps. I mean, c’mon, who cares? It’s an auto-everything world in any case.
  • The point-and-shoot camera is doomed. Bread and butter for the likes of Canon and Nikon who had both better wake up fast. Superior lens, sensor and processing technology in newer cell phones obsolete the need to carry yet another gadget. And the cell phone camera is ‘free’, plus it can upload to the web.
  • I will make $5 million, a new auction record, by taking a picture of my garbage can and retaining Andreas Gursky’s agent to flog it for me. I hope to net $100,000 after commissions and taxes. The underlying storyline will focus on “…. the artist’s deepening conflicts on the meaning of recycling in a post modern age”. The first sale will actually be for no less than $7mm, but the buyer, a hedge fund manager, will bounce the check claiming he needs the loot to pay his lawyers to keep him out of the slammer on insider trading charges.
  • The Lytro camera will fail. Only bad pictures have more than one main subject, and Lytro’s technology caters exactly to that issue. Plus the design looks plain silly and the definition is probably poor.
  • Apple will make a real camera with a Siri command interface and no dumb brick LCD menu system. Offering fewer options than any $200 point-and-shoot it will retail for $500, will take crackerjack snaps in the right hands, and will be sold out for months. Oh! yes, and it will make phone calls and toast on the side.
  • Panasonic will make a pro-grade Micro Four-Thirds camera and you will start seeing it used by pros at sports events. Annual greasing ‘commissions’ from Panny to have pros convince the world that MFT is the Real Thing will run into the $millions. Chiropractors will fight with offsetting bribes to Nikon and Canon pro-DSLRs users in an effort to retain their annuity incomes derived from treating these users for spinal problems.
  • I will narrowly avoid death several times from competing bikers on the streets of San Francisco on BikeCamâ„¢. My latest crappy bike will be stolen, again, but unknown to the thief, this one will have a hidden GPS tracking chip, the frame will be loaded with a pound of C4 and my iPhone will be the remote triggering device.

The dining experience will be increasingly featured as your intrepid snapper-gourmand searches out diverse, and mostly cheap, eating places, which you will find under the Dining category. Don’t look for wine advice here, a good brew being the order of the day.

Carmel. G3, Oly 9-18 @9mm with distortion correction.