American Cinematographer - April 2018 - 24

The light meter is a wonderful tool
that still has a strong place in today's heavily
digital production environments. However, as
more and more cinematographers are entering the industry without having had the
opportunity to expose film, techniques for
using light meters have started to wane.
The incident light meter is one of the
most common handheld meters available. As
noted in a previous Shot Craft ("To Meter or
Not to Meter," AC Dec. '17), it measures the
incident light falling onto the meter, before
the light hits the subject to be photographed.
This type of meter is easily recognized by its
"half ping-pong ball" light-gathering hemisphere, which is designed to approximate the
curvature of the human face and is intended
to average the light levels falling on it. Place
the hemisphere in front of the subject's face,
pointing toward the lens, and take a reading;
this reading will average-out the light levels
striking the hemisphere and give an f-stop
reading correlating to the aperture setting on
your lens for "proper" exposure of the
subject. This is a fine technique for an average exposure - but it leaves a lot to be
desired in the way of creative control.
A more refined methodology with an
incident meter is to measure each light
source, independently, that's striking your
subject. In a classic three-light scenario, you
would measure your key, fill and backlight
separately. To do this, you place the meter at
the subject's position, but instead of facing
the hemisphere toward the lens, you face it
toward a single light source that's illuminating your subject and take a reading of that
source alone; this often requires shading the
ball to eliminate any stray light from a source
other than the one you're trying to read.
Then, if your meter has one, you can set that
measurement into the meter's memory function and move on to the next source, and
then the next. Armed with this knowledge,
you can then decide for yourself where you
want these values to fall in the overall exposure of the scene.
I generally underexpose Caucasian
skin tone about a stop to a stop-and-a-half
under "key" - which, in this case, refers to
the stop at which I set my lens. I rarely, if ever,
set any particular value in the scene actually
24

April 2018

at key. Instead, I tend to place skin tones
under key and highlights over key. To my eye,
this results in a much more refined look.
By individually measuring each light as
a separate value, you provide yourself with a
great deal of information to fine-tune your
lighting. Is your backlight reading 2 stops
hotter than your key light? Is that too much?
If it is, you can easily ask your gaffer to drop
a double in the appropriate fixture to drop
the backlight's intensity to just a single stop
over the key light. If you hadn't measured the
lights individually, you wouldn't be able to
make this decision nearly as quickly or
methodically.
Some meters allow you to remove the
"ping-pong ball" and replace it with a flat
disc, or to retract the ball inside the face of
the meter to mimic a flat disc. This makes the
measuring of individual fixtures much easier,
as it requires less shading from stray light.
As odd as it may seem, it is also very
effective to take meter readings where there
aren't actually any lights. Perhaps your talent
is merely lit from a window. You take a reading from the subject's position toward the
window to get your "key light" reading, and
then take a reading on the shadow side of
the room - facing away from the window
- to measure the amount of ambient light
bouncing around the room. Even without a
light source facing the shadow side, the
ambient light will often be enough for your
meter to give you a reading.
This is an important technique for
determining the ratio of the key to shadow

side of your subject. Knowing the dynamic
range of your camera and the look you
intend to create will inform whether or not
you need to add a bounce or some fill for the
shadow side. If that shadow side is 8 stops
under the key but you want to see detail in
that side of the face, you know you have to
add some fill.
Understanding the dynamic range of
your medium is critical to understanding how
to handle your exposures. To that end, I have
a favorite technique that I use in metering
that nearly every digital meter is capable of.
Often I know the stop at which I want to
shoot my scene; I'll choose it ahead of time
to control the depth of field in the scene. If I
know I want to shoot a scene at T2.8, for
example, I'll use my meter and take measurements around me until I get exactly 2.8 on
the meter, and then I'll lock that into the
memory. It doesn't matter where I measure
that 2.8, just as long as I get the meter to
read it somewhere. Then, with that reading
set in memory, I put the meter into "average" function - so now, whenever I take a
reading on set, instead of showing me the
f-stop value for that reading, the meter will
show me how many stops above or below
the memory setting this reading is. This will
instantly tell me if my key light is 11⁄3 stops
over, for example, or my shadow side is 1
stop under, or my backlight is 2 stops over.
This is an extremely quick and easy way to
dial in the ratios - so easy, in fact, it almost
always feels like cheating!
- JH

Bruno Delbonnel, ASC, AFC takes an incident-meter reading on actor Oscar Isaac during
production of the feature Inside Llewyn Davis.

American Cinematographer

Inside Llewyn Davis photo by Alison Rosa, courtesy of CBS Films.

Tech Essentials
Using an Incident Light Meter



Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - April 2018

Contents
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