Godfrey DiGiorgi wrote: >IMO, a good hand-held light meter does a much better job of being a >light meter than any compact camera does.
Well, yeah. But it can't double as a camera when need be. :-) And for my purposes, a digital camera works just as well as a light meter. For the nature photography stuff I do the histogram and (especially) highlight and shadow "blinkies" let me get my exposures perfect in situations where an incident light meter would be impossible to use and readings with a spotmeter would take too much time and fuss. I've used my digital SLRs in the past this way and I get perfect exposures for slide film 10 out of 10 times (which is actually one too many because PrintFile negative pages for 6x7 hold only nine slides and I'd like to be able to toss one out). In a studio or other reasonably controlled situation a genuine light meter is the way to go. When standing in the middle of a stream on the side of a mountain and shooting a waterfall, I choose a digital snapshot and histogram every time (it even gives be a back up photo if the lab screws up). -- Mark Roberts - Photography & Multimedia www.robertstech.com -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
