AshleyC
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Ok i bought a Sekonic L-308S the other day for studio work. Im not sure if im using it right or not tbh.
It has one mode where it reads ambient light, it takes a reading and stores these settings, you can then do things like change the aperture or shutter speed and it will recalculate the other setting for you. Fantastically useful when outdoors using natural light.
However in flash trigger mode all you can seem to do is set the shutter speed and it will calculate the aperture when the studio flash triggers it. Reselecting anything resets the whole thing to 0 and you have to take another reading.
now i find this pretty annoying! As an example, if i want to shoot at a really wide open aperture to get some DOF going i cant take a reading of required shutter speed to do that so end up taking several shots and maybe adjusting the lights up or down until i get the desired exposure / DOF combination, which seems to defeat the point of the meter in the first place?
I know in a studio environment your pretty much tied into synch speeds anyway so you dont have an awful lot of leeway in that respect, i guess my question is do all light meters run like this? And if you wanted to change from 1/250 f8 or whatever the basic setting seems to be to f1.8 how would you work out the lighting / shutter speed quickly? Is it just experience?
It has one mode where it reads ambient light, it takes a reading and stores these settings, you can then do things like change the aperture or shutter speed and it will recalculate the other setting for you. Fantastically useful when outdoors using natural light.
However in flash trigger mode all you can seem to do is set the shutter speed and it will calculate the aperture when the studio flash triggers it. Reselecting anything resets the whole thing to 0 and you have to take another reading.
now i find this pretty annoying! As an example, if i want to shoot at a really wide open aperture to get some DOF going i cant take a reading of required shutter speed to do that so end up taking several shots and maybe adjusting the lights up or down until i get the desired exposure / DOF combination, which seems to defeat the point of the meter in the first place?
I know in a studio environment your pretty much tied into synch speeds anyway so you dont have an awful lot of leeway in that respect, i guess my question is do all light meters run like this? And if you wanted to change from 1/250 f8 or whatever the basic setting seems to be to f1.8 how would you work out the lighting / shutter speed quickly? Is it just experience?