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Spot meter use cases


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I have a Spectra incident meter. I've heard it's a good idea to have a spot meter as well.

I know they're good for metering stuff you can't reach with an incident meter, or balancing practicals and whatnot. But those seem pretty situational. What are some other, more common uses for a spot meter?

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Hi Brian, 

There's certainly both a technical and philosophical difference between the two - the incident meter tells you how much light is traveling through a particular point in space on set, while a spot meter tells you the actual amount of light reflecting off of a subject towards the camera position.  If you wanted to indulge your inner Ansel Adams and think in terms of the zone system, a spot meter would be the way to go.  If you know your acquisition medium well enough, it might be possible to use a spot meter exclusively.  But in practice, I've almost always relied on my incident meter. 

In the not so distant past, when I filmed on film and had separate spot and incident meters, I would take out my spot meter mainly to check a practical or a very saturated color to check that was within the stock's dynamic range.  Using a reflected meter requires advance knowledge of your capture medium's dynamic range / tone response in order to be truly useful.  With digital cameras, a waveform meter that's interpreting the camera's log response can replace a spot meter, and saves you some of the trouble of interpreting how a scene-reflected value corresponds to a camera tone / code value.  The last couple Sekonic meters I've owned have had both functions in one, so sometimes it's faster to just spot meter something from where I'm standing than to walk back to the camera or the DIT station and bring up a waveform. 

There is some marginal value to having a second meter on hand to check the meters' measurements against one another - I did have an incident meter fail on me in the middle of production once.  But if you can only afford one meter for now, I'd say your money would be better spent having your incident meter calibrated to ensure that it's accurate. 

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Well said, Daniel. 

A few use cases where a spot meter would be helpful - metering screens, windows, specular reflections, sunlit sides of buildings, backlit water and pavement, bright skies and clouds.

Of course, as Daniel says if you’re shooting on a digital camera and have access to false color tools or a waveform monitor, then that does much the same thing.

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Spot meters are also great for checking your key to fill ratio! Once you get the lighting the way you like it, use the spot meter to check the value of the key side and the fill side of the subject. Write those down and reference them for the reverse and other angles.

I'm sure it goes without saying, but make sure your meters match during camera prep. ?

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I have both meters and I’ve found that I rarely use the spot meter when shooting digital.

i do use it for shooting still photographs on film though.

i use the incident meter when shooting digital movies while setting lights, and sometimes for setting the camera exposure, usually on day exteriors.

i never measure lighting ratios though. I always done that by eye as I think a perceptual match is better than a technical match.

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