What Is a Light Meter?

Video Transcript

"My name is Anthony Maddaloni, and I'm going to be talking about what a light meter is. Now a light meter, there's two different types. There's a hand held light meter, and there's a light meter that is built into your camera. Most photographers use a light meter that built into your camera. And what that is is it's a meter that measures the sensitivity of the light compared to the ASA that you have your camera set on. Very important to remember to set that ASA at the right ASA that you want to shoot at. And what that meter does inside your camera is it's going through a lens and it's measuring the range of light in a certain scene. Now this is one interesting thing about light meters. No matter how advanced technology gets, it's still not quite as smart as our brain. So when a light meter is metering for a scene, it sees a very bright part of that scene and it incorporates into that overall scene of this. So if you're photographing a concert, say, and you have a very bright spotlight behind the lead singer, that light meter still sees that bright spotlight as part of the whole scene. So what it's doing, is it's giving you a misreading. It's one of the hardest things for me to teach people about shooting. That light meter is no way near a smart as you. So you want to think about well, that lead singer is sort of in shadow. That's what I want to expose for. I don't really care about the light behind the lead singer. So that's one instance that a light meter is really useful, but also can give you a misreading. Now a hand held light meter is a more professional light meter. And it's a meter that you can really take a reading of a whole scene from. Light meters like that can range from about one hundred dollars all the way up to one thousand dollars depending on how incredibly accurate some of them can be. But, almost all modern day cameras have a light meter built into them. And once you take the time to get, you know, your camera, it could be an absolutely essential tool in photography. And that is what a light meter is."