Seeing the Light

Just a few days ago I acquired an object that I've been in search of for several months; a light meter! I had gotten to a point where I couldn't progress any further with my pinhole photography because I couldn't get a handle on lighting or exposure times. I'd say I've been lucky to get a decent picture only one in every five or six tries thus far. That's because the exposure times I was using were determined by the not-so-sophisticated method of guessing. Cloudy weather, 30 seconds. Sunny skies, something less than that. Highly lit subjects got less time, and shadowy ones got more. Not exactly a sure fire method.


A few days ago I was at a really dingy thrift store. I was itching to get out of there, but Ryan spotted something in the display case. A light meter. We took it out and had a look, and sure enough, it worked! For the meager price of $9.99 I walked off with a 1946 model GE exposure meter. Ryan even found a scanned copy of the actual user's manual online.


It's not ideal, but it's a huge step in the right direction. Since I'm using a pinhole camera, my f-stop is way higher than any of the values on the exposure dial. That simply means that I can't use the dial to calculate the necessary exposure time directly. I'll have to play around with it a bit and make my own light values/exposure chart. It'll take some time, but in theory it should work just as well. In the next week or so I hope to do some research and play around with the meter a bit. With any luck, I hope to use this puppy to get my success rate up as close to 100% as possible.