I used the (free, iOS) "Pocket Light Meter" - it worked fairly well, got a no-nonsense design (which I appreciate) - and well, it's free 🙂
Honestly though, at some point I realized that for most of what I do incident metering works a lot better really, so I got a small but proper "real" light meter (a Sekonic L-308X) and this has been the best investment in my photography in a good while.
I use the two you mentioned: Viewfinder and myLightMeter, and they're great. MyLightMeter has an incident mode, and I happened to have a lumisphere that was designed for the iPhone so I can use it; I tested it against my Sekonic and it's accurate although the lumisphere only just covers the lens and you have to be sure it's seated properly. What I like about Viewfinder is that you can take a reference photo with the settings so you can see what your f-stop and shutter speed were for every photo you took on the roll. And GPS info is there too, I think, so you can get locations.
Nowadays I use the phone as a backup: it's waterproof and my regular meters are not. When the weather's good I use a Sekonic or else a shoe-mounted meter for convenience.
One thing I discovered about phone meters: if you're taking photos of people and you use your phone to get a meter reading, they think you just took a photo with your phone and they start to relax or walk away. The "relax" bit is good and sometimes makes for better photos, but "walking away" is not good. It's happened to me half a dozen times with the phone but never happens with a "real" light meter.
Interesting on checking against the sekonic for incident metering. I want to look up the iPhone lumisphere now.
Have either of you tried against a spot meter? Often that’s how I’m using myLightMeter, by tapping on a specific area of an image to get a “spot”-ish reading.
Gotta say, viewfinder has been excellent. I use it for an old folder that’s zone focus/can’t-see-through-the-lens, and it’s been a huge help for framing and exposure.
I use Light Meter for Android, but only for reciprocity, pinhole and ND filter calculations. I use a Sekonic L-408 in incident mode 99% of the time, and the built in 5 degree spot when needed.
Tina Kino wrote:
I used the (free, iOS) "Pocket Light Meter" - it worked fairly well, got a no-nonsense design (which I appreciate) - and well, it's free 🙂
Honestly though, at some point I realized that for most of what I do incident metering works a lot better really, so I got a small but proper "real" light meter (a Sekonic L-308X) and this has been the best investment in my photography in a good while.
That is the one I have, but it was not free for me because I voluntarily donated
But I have found it to be unreliable. Sometimes it gives an obviously incorrect reading and I’m not metering complicated lighting conditions - it just goes wonky. So I can’t recommend it because I cannot trust it.
Lightme is amazing - by far best user interface in a light meter app I've seen. Some others may look stylish (LightMeterWheel & Lightmate for example), but functionality is usually much more restricted.
It does the normal reflective metering but you can switch into a spot meter mode on the fly and also use the zone system when doing so - I often use that with negative film to e.g. meter a shadow area and put it in zone III.
It also has profiles for basically every film available and automatically corrects for reciprocity error. When there is no reciprocity factor available or you want to set one yourself you can also do that very easily.
Really the only thing it can't do - and that's a hardware problem not the apps problem - is incident metering.
Just grabbed lightme. Zone system + reciprocity options are great. I recently was out shooting t-max 100 at night (I had a few shots left on the roll, not usually what I'd reach for in low light). Having better reciprocity than approximate guesses would have been nice.
I use an iOS app called Light Meter. I think it was free. I've compared it a bit to my metered cameras and it seems to track fine. Well enough that I still haven't bothered to purchase a real handheld or accessory meter, anyway.
I also have LightMe, but I haven't used it much. It does seem feature-rich, however.
bjhurley wrote:
I use the two you mentioned: Viewfinder and myLightMeter, and they're great. MyLightMeter has an incident mode, and I happened to have a lumisphere that was designed for the iPhone so I can use it; I tested it against my Sekonic and it's accurate although the lumisphere only just covers the lens and you have to be sure it's seated properly. What I like about Viewfinder is that you can take a reference photo with the settings so you can see what your f-stop and shutter speed were for every photo you took on the roll. And GPS info is there too, I think, so you can get locations.
Nowadays I use the phone as a backup: it's waterproof and my regular meters are not. When the weather's good I use a Sekonic or else a shoe-mounted meter for convenience.
One thing I discovered about phone meters: if you're taking photos of people and you use your phone to get a meter reading, they think you just took a photo with your phone and they start to relax or walk away. The "relax" bit is good and sometimes makes for better photos, but "walking away" is not good. It's happened to me half a dozen times with the phone but never happens with a "real" light meter. ...Show more →
What's the iPhone lumisphere called? I'm struggling to find anything made in the past ~10 years or so.
I would have bought it around 2016 or 2017 when I was trying to avoid spending $2,000 on a Sekonic colour temperature meter for my cine cameras; there is a really good cine metering app for iPhone (Cine Meter II) that requires a lumisphere for colour temperature readings and this is the one they recommended. The problem is that for accurate results you have to calibrate the cine metering app on the phone against a proper handheld colour temperature meter, so I ended up spending the $2,000 on the Sekonic after all and use that instead.
That Lightme app sounds awesome, I'm going to get it. The reciprocity data will come in very handy; I have that in my pinhole camera metering app (which is wonderful) but it only works for pinhole cameras.
I am using the free Lightmate app. One of the best I found working with the iOS system and being free. Former good ones I have used are no longer free unfortunately.
I put a Wein MRB625 in my 50+ y.o. Nikkormat to start shooting film, then tested it in moderately low light (ASA 400, 1/250sec, f/2.8) against Lightme on my Android phone and against my Z5-II. They all agreed.
The only downsides would be the inconvenience of pulling out my phone and the fact that it reads the entire field of the phone's camera which may not be appropriate for a telephoto shot.
