Old meters

I’ve got several old manual cameras with no (or no working) light meter. That shouldn’t be a problem, as I also have some old light meters. And that’s how it begins: you buy an old light meter and use it. Then you buy another one that might look or work better. But they give different readings. So you try a third meter to see if two of them agree. And then you have a box full of meters that all give different readings. So what’s a poor nerd to do?

I know there is a movement to not use meters at all and to guess the exposure. That feels to me like guessing how much fuel is in your car. Or I could buy one of these new clip-on meters, but where’s the fun in that? I think my entire collection of meters cost less than a new one. And part of the joy of using old kit is getting it to work.

So what I need is an objective standard to compare my meters against and show me how (in)accurate they are. Some can be adjusted and some can be compensated. But where do I find my gold standard?

Luckily I bought my standard years ago when I was going down the Zone System mineshaft. I have a very good Sekonic incident meter and a sheet of Kodak grey card. I know – I should just carry the Sekonic meter around with me, but I don’t. It’s a bit big and my ideal would be one of my other meters that switches easily between incident and reflective readings and is also smaller.

As an aside, I also have a number of Weston meters. These are things of mechanical beauty and reputed accuracy. But did everyone in the past have amazing eyesight? The aperture and speed scales on a Weston Master II are tiny. It’s like the Mercury camera I used to have – I needed reading specs and good lighting to set the lens aperture. I have a Weston Master III though, which is more legible.

Drop the “1/” from the shutter speeds and the numbers can be bigger

Make sure that the pointer is reading zero with the cell covered. If not, adjust with the screw on the front. Point the meter to a clear north sky at any time between 10 A.M and 2 P.M. There must not be any clouds or haze. An accurate meter will give a reading of approximately 320 Lumens – the scale used before the Euromaster series. That’s just over half way across the dial with the baffle closed. This should translate to f/16 at 1/100, with film speed set to ASA/ISO 100.

http://www.westonmeter.org.uk

So I did the ‘north sky test’ with the Weston meters and surprisingly some of them were good. I’d formed the opinion that they were incorrect because I was comparing them with my phone app (but see below). Right then, here’s the plan:

• Set up my ‘good’ Sekonic meter and a grey card under steady daylight.
• Compare my incident meters with the Sekonic.
• Once I have a dual-type meter that agrees with the Sekonic, use it to get the same reading off the grey card by moving the grey card around.
• Point my reflection meters at the grey card and see if they agree with the Sekonic.
• If a meter consistently misreads, make a note of how I need to adjust the ISO setting to compensate.

The first and most interesting finding was that the light meter app in my phone was off. I suppose it’s more accurate to say that my phone was off. Luckily I had paid for the full licence, which meant I could adjust it. I suppose the lesson in this is not to blindly trust something new until you have tested it.

So how did my tests work out? Far better than I expected. All of the meters bar one worked. The Leningrad meter confirmed my suspicions by over-exposing by one stop. I’d been given a second Leningrad, and that over-exposed by a stop too.

The various Weston meters all seemed to work. The film speed rating they use is slightly different to ISO, but only by a third of a stop. For the sort of cameras I’ll be using, I can ignore this.

One meter, a Danubia, has a design flaw that makes it easy to take wrong readings. Since I have plenty of working meters, this one can go.

Set the meter reading using the little window at the bottom, NOT the EV scale above it.

One surprise was an ancient Ilford meter. Once I’d cleaned the glass over the light cell and figured out what the modern equivalent of its film speeds were, it worked.

For a meter that appears to be old, it has some very modern apertures and speeds.

Perhaps the winner though is a tiny Photopia meter. I took it with me when I went to the local beer festival. There were some bands playing under a gazebo, as it threatened to rain. So I’m taking pictures of people in shade while sat in sunlight, on an ancient Argus metered by the smallest light meter I own. And it worked.

The Photopia meter compared with a Weston for scale

Not the best posed shots, but I was there for the beer and only brought the camera to give it a walk.

The Lydia Bousfield Trio

Richard Halma

So now I have a boxful of meters I can trust. Not a bad result for an hour’s work.