This post is for people interested in photography only – beginner to intermediate – so WARNING: Boring technical photog post ahead! haha!
OK, first of all, I have to thank my friend Shelley for getting me to dust off my light meter again and for challenging me to shoot in manual more.
I seriously only used my light meter to initially get the reading for my studio lights & never used it after that. But now I’ve been using it quite frequently for shooting natural light. (oh, and I used Heather Ann’s awesome doodled arrows below here – everyone needs them! Soooo great! Plus they are only $1.99!)
This is the lovely Sekonic light meter – pretty much the industry standard as far as light meters go. I admit, I have just a surface knowledge of it – i.e. i know just enough to do the job, so that is what I’ll talk about here. BTW – the day I took this photo was for Addi’s session. It was SUPER overcast that day…in order to have an f-stop of 2.8 & shutter speed of 1/125 (with an active child, you really can’t go much lower than that!) – I had to have an ISO of 800! Good thing my camera (Nikon D300) is pretty good w/ the higher ISOs – i.e. not much “noise”.
What you do is just turn the top white dome out, set the ISO you’d like (hold down the ISO 1 button and turn the large dial on the right-hand side) and Shutter speed you’d like (turn the same dial – just don’t hold down any buttons). Make sure the icon at the top is on the sun – (to change it, hold down the mode button & turn the large dial). If your subject is sitting there ready to have their photo taken, hold the light meter TOWARDS the light source – sorta by their chin – this will read the light that is hitting them so you know what to set your camera to. The number that will change will be the f-stop – or in other words, it will tell you what you need to set for your f-stop (since you’ve already determined all the other variable factors of ISO & shutter speed).
Once you have your light meter reading, you can turn the dial and it will give you different “options” – i.e. if you want a lower f-stop number, your shutter speed would be faster, etc. – and it will tell you what those numbers are so you don’t need to think about it.
As long as your light doesn’t change drastically, you should be go to go w/ the reading and shouldn’t have to keep changing it.Take some test shots and see if they look under or over-exposed.
I also shoot a LOT in aperture priority. With aperture priority, you are setting the aperture (& ISO) and the CAMERA decides what the shutter speed will be based on the available light – as measured by the camera’s light meter. This is all fine & good MOST of the time. The problem is if the person is very light-skinned, dark-skinned, or they are wearing dark clothes, you have a really light backdrop, or dark backdrop, etc. – those things can “trick” the camera’s light meter so you don’t get the proper reading. This was happening to me more often than I’d like, so that’s why I’ve started shooting more in manual lately. See your camera’s manual about metering – it will explain a lot. When I am shooting aperture priority & doing portraits, I’m usually in the spot metering setting.
Anyway, this is the set up I used for Drew – see this post. 
So for this particular set up, I took my meter readings before the client came (around 10:00am). The meter readings were as follows:
ISO 400, shutter speed 1/125, f-stop 2.8, auto white balance (I swear, the next thing I’m going to take is a custom white balance in this room! I’m really getting tired of working so hard in post-production on fixing it!)
On Sunday when Olivia came (around 1pm), the readings were actually as follows:
ISO 400, shutter 1/250, f-stop 2.8. On the left is the SOOC (straight out of camera) shot.
Here’s what I did to correct the photo (this is pretty much the same as the Lauren at 9mos post):
1) curves adjustment (ctrl-M, pull down slightly on the lower left 1/4 part of the line, up slightly on the upper 1/4 part of the line), then hit OK, then ctrl-M for ANOTHER curves adjustment – pulling UP in the middle of the line.
2) sharpening action
3) created duplicate layer (layer – duplicate layer)
4) w/ top layer selected, created a layer mask – (layer – layer mask – select “hide all”)
5) painted back w/ paintbrush (soft) set to 50% opacity, 50% flow – paintbrush set to WHITE (which basically “erases” the black layer mask you created in step 4) – PAINT where you DON’T want it to be BLUE – i.e. the “WHITE” backdrop!
6) once I was done “painting”, I selected the PHOTO in the top (duplicate) layer – and went to “image” – “adjustments” – “hue/saturation” – and click where it says “edit” and click the down arrow to select “blues” (an eyedropper tool shows up)
7) then click on a blue section of your photo…then click on the saturation slider and drop it down FAR to the left – which will remove the blue tones from your backdrop….(but it WON’T affect the photo where you HAVEN’T erased w/ the white brush from the layer mask…i.e. if the person has BLUE eyes or BLUE jeans, do NOT erase that part).
once you have removed the blues to your liking, you can move on.
9) after I was all done w/ that, I took the healing brush and healed some areas around her nose…then used a skin smoothening action.
10) I added Pioneer Woman “warmer” at 25% opacity – this is in set 2.
11) LAST I used Pioneer Woman “Fresh & Colorful” action from set 1 – dropping the soft light & saturation layers back a little.
BTW for Olivia’s WHOLE session I used the 24-70mm f/2.8 Nikon lens on my Nikon D300(natural light I’m talking…studio I use my Tamron 17-50mm f/2.8 lens on my D200). For Drew’s, I used that lens, the 60mm f/2.8 macro & the 50mm f/1.4 – kept switching.
OK class, so that’s been our lesson on light meters. haha! Just kidding…but if you don’t want to shell out the bucks for it, you can use your in-camera light meter. Fill the frame with the subject’s face (you might have to get in CLOSE!)or use the back of your hand. For more info, see your manual.
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