Canon 814 + sekonic l-508

[jon lawrence]

Hi, I recently brought a sekonic l-508 and have tested it against the internal light meter in my canon 814AZ. I expected there to be some difference which there was- my light meter measured roughly 1 stop higher than my camera. I know I loose about 1/3 of a stop due to some of the light going to the viewfinder and also the sekonic measures assuming the cameras has a 180 degrees shutter angle where as canon 814s have a 150 degree shutter angle. So my first questions is does the difference in shutter angle account for the remaining 2/3 difference?

Also, I?m aware that the sekonic has a setting which allows you to compensate for such situations. The trouble I?m having is working out the right value to compensate for the difference in f-stops. The values which you programme in range from 0.1 ? 9.9. I?m unsure how these values relate to the f-stops. Would 3.3 be 1/3 of a stop?

 

Thanks in advance for any help.

 

Jon Lawrence

[Alessandro Machi]

Hi Jon, I noticed you posted this topic 6 days ago and nobody has been able to give you an answer. I'm sorry nobody from the other forums could find the time to answer your question over the past six days because there are couple of posters who think nothing of verbally assaulting others so it's sad to see they have time to be abusive and condescending to others but seem to be above answering topics such as this one.

 

The canon viewfinder, and most super-8 viewfinders as well, are set up to split off some of the light that comes through the lens over to the viewfinder. This spliting of the incoming light gives the viewfinder it's brightness, but this also cuts down some of the light that reaches the film plane. I don't know how much light that is split off to the viewfinder but I have read others mention that it is around 1/2 of an f-stop. Some thing it could be 2/3's of an f-stop.

 

I try to compensate for the potential loss of light and auto-exposure inaccuracies in general by shifting the ASA adjustment knob on the Canon 1014-XLS to over-expose by 1/3 of an f-stop. I may change this to 2/3's of a stop as time goes on but since I manually expose everything I don't really know far off the auto-exposure meter usually is.

 

It might be wise to have some "fun" and just shoot one film cartridge in the autoexposure mode to how accurate the autoexposure meter actually is with the ASA setting at plus 1/3 of an f-stop as this can help teach you when to trust the auto-exposure meter and when not to trust the meter.