Category: Specials

Incident metering without an incident meter – introducing PocketChris Incident Light Meter

Incident light meters are expensive. They can easily go for $300 or more. The recently announced Sekonic L-748DR with touch screen will be almost $470.

Your camera’s automatic metering in the Program, Aperture Priority or Shutter Priority modes does a remarkably good job. Unfortunately there are still quite a few light situations the camera’s reflective metering will fail and give you exposures that are either too bright or too dark.

Think white rabbit in snow or band on stage with a black backdrop. But even in every-day situations the reflectivity of a scene can be off if there are too many bright or dark objects.

What if you could achieve excellent measurements and great exposures in the studio or in difficult light situations without having to melt your credit card?

Meet PocketChris Incident Light Meter!

Introducing a new member in the PocketChris family of iPhone apps: the new PocketChris Incident Light Meter!

PocketChris Incident Light MeterPocketChris Incident Light Meter is ready for iOS 6 and iPhone 5 and will allow you to use a simple 18% grey card to achieve results that rival an expensive dedicated incident light meter.

Instead of having to buy a dedicated incident light meter, the grey card will set you back about $10.

Incident Metering will almost always yield better results than the automatic measurements that your camera does.


Here’s how it works

Set the camera to a suitable ISO and aperture. Take two shutter speed readings using the spot meter in your DSLR, one with the grey card facing towards the bright side and one with the grey card facing towards the dark side:

Measurement 1, camera suggests 1/60 sec
Measurement 1

Measurement 2, camera suggests 1/15 sec
Measurement 2

PocketChris Incident Light Meter suggests 1/34 sec:
Result

Picture taken with 1/30 sec, the closest shutter speed to the suggested value:
Result

As an added bonus, while you have the grey card out, do a quick custom white balance and get perfect colours too!

PocketChris Incident Light Meter has just been submitted to the App Store for review, it should be available within the next week or two.

Grey cards are readily available at most retailers. B&H Photo has them, Midwest Photo Exchange has a set at a particularly good value and if you’re in Europe, check out the cards at enjoyyourcamera.com

5 Weeks (2): Photo Day at TWiT

Photo Day 2012 at TWiT with Leo Laporte The recap continues. After the Washington D.C. workshop, I continued to San Francisco, or rather north of it to Petaluma in beautiful Sonoma County.

As in previous years, Leo Laporte was super awesome to let me have the TWiT studio again for a few hours to talk to interesting guest from the photography world, including kite aerial photographer Cris Benton. Over three hours of the four-hour event survived as a video on YouTube (but don’t worry if you don’t have the time to watch the whole thing, I will put pieces of it on the TFTTF podcast over the next months)

While up there, I also spent time at the TWiT studio to take a few group shots of the team:

TWiT group shot

» more from the 2012 tour

Google bought NIK Software – is this the end of great looking photography?

Google acquires NIK Software

Today NIK Software announced that they’ve been acquired by Google – and the photography world is in turmoil. The comments range from “Hope you have better luck than those before you…” to “Congrats and good luck!” and anything in between.

John Arnold of PhotoWalkthrough.com has written a post about the 7 stages of Nik/Google grief where he even quotes me, saying “I see it as an opportunity to do more education around how to get great b/w conversions without the help of NIK” – and that pretty much reflects my stance on the topic.

Spanish Mill

First, let me say that I love NIK’s plugins, I own several of them and I have used them a lot, especially some of the plugins in the ColorEfex collection. Pro Contrast anyone?

But before you despair, the acquisition doesn’t mean that all your NIK plugins will all of a sudden vanish from your system. You bought them, you own them and at least for months, if not years, you’ll be able to use them.

The acquisition doesn’t even mean that NIK Software’s plugins will go away at all. Who knows what Google has planned for them?

There are also alternatives. John Arnold points out the plugins by Topaz Labs and OnOne Software. I haven’t used either, but I’ve heard good things.

But most important: even though NIK Software’s plugins are great and their U Point technology makes things fairly easy, you’ll be able to get a lot (if not most) of what the plugins do out of the on-board tools that you already have.

Tab Two

If the NIK plugins should go away, I see that as a huge chance for educators to teach photographers what’s going on behind the curtain. With all these plugins, we have forgotten how to do things ourselves. The automatic mode is just oh so convenient.

Let’s for example have a quick look at NIK’s Pro Contrast filter. The secret of good contrast is in knowing how to properly set the black point of an image, how to read a histogram and in knowing what exposure zones the different things look best in. Do you know where an old person’s white hair should be on the histogram? Or the black hoodie a model is wearing? Learn these things and you’ll never have to resort to anything but your eyes and a tone curve.

Paper Mill

Once you know the basics, you’ll be able to achieve excellent results with pretty much any tool that you have access to. Which is why for the last three years I haven’t actually used NIK tools, not even on the pictures on this page. I didn’t have to.

So let’s learn together! Let’s use this as a chance to expand our horizon and make ourselves a little more independent of all the tools that do seemingly magical things that often we can achieve in other ways.

Your thoughts?