Using reflected light to judge proper exposure

It is at best a guess. Sure, you might get close, but it's still a guess. You might even get lucky and nail it, but it was still a guess...a lucky guess.

Modern cameras have all kind of crutches to try and help. There are "spot" metering modes, highlight blowout views on the EVF, average metering, matrix metering, but in the end, all the camera and photographer are doing is guessing at the setting for best exposure.

I can't say for sure, but I'm assuming the people that contracted me to provide pictures of this event would have preferred it that I did not guess. So I showed up the night before for dress rehearsal and took a few measurements. I now knew that at f2.8 (the widest my lens can go) and 1/125 shutter (the slowest I dare shoot to freeze motion), I needed to set the ISO to 1600. Done.

I could have brought a grey card and took a reflective reading off that, but why? I already measured the light that would be falling on the stage. Sure, it changes from scene to scene, but in this case, if it was darker on the stage, I wanted the image to be darker. I wanted the cameras to see exactly what my eye was seeing. The last thing I wanted was an in-camera meter brightening, darkening or heaven forbid averaging the exposure. What a nightmare that would have been.

If you'd care to, click on the image I posted and surf through all the shots from that performance. You will see that 90% are ISO1600, f2.8 and 1/125 shutter. A few are 1/250 when all the stage lights came on. There was no need for an in-camera meter to be constantly making adjustments depending on where I was pointing the lens and how much reflected light happened to hit the sensor at that moment.

If I didn't have the opportunity to get on stage and directly measure the light, my second choice would have been to spot meter off Cinderella's white-white dress and go 4 stops down from there leaving her dress in zone 9.

The point is once I have this measurement, the only stupid thing I could do would be not to turn off my camera's meter for the rest of the evening.

I guess the reason I harp on incident light is that it seems to be a forgotten path to perfect exposure in this day and age of modern, "do everything for you" cameras. No one has to educate or advocate for in-camera reflective metering.

A meter works the same for digital or film. The problem is an in camera meter takes a reading of reflected light but, not all surfaces will reflect the same amount of light. Even worse are the meter modes that use part or all of the scene and the camera guesses what you're metering for.

In camera meter can be just as accurate if you use a grey card or other known surface to meter off of, palm of your hand for example. It's easier to use a hand held meter though and I most often carry mine.

The biggest problem lies in people not understanding how to meter with what they are using. In camera or hand held meter will both be just as accurate if the person operating it knows what they are doing.

There is an entire generation of shooters (maybe two generations) that don't have a clue how to calculate an exposure and think the only way is to set their camera on auto "something" and shoot away, making adjustments on the fly from a 2" LCD screen.

I was one of them until I saw the light.