A smartphone Light Meter app lets your phone be the hand held meter for your film camera
Toronto. Smartphone users have it easy when it comes to photography. The biggest issue is how to find the camera button quickly! As we all know, smartphone cameras are nearly idiot-proof – ISO, speed, focus, white balance, and EXPOSURE are all set automatically.
For much of the ‘analogue’ era this wasn’t the case at all. The camera could be set for speed and aperture; the film et al determined the ISO, colour, white balance, etc. But most importantly, the human mind and an exposure meter determined the light intensity and what camera settings would give a decent result for a given film.
To use an old expression, when it comes to photography, the average smartphone user is, “fat, dumb, and happy”! The niche film geeks are something else. They quickly learn that unless their chosen film camera has a working built-in light meter, or they have a working hand held light meter, all film exposures are “by guess and by god”!
Now there’s an app for that. Last Sunday’s How-To Geek brings up an article called, “How to Use a Light Meter App to Shoot Film” written by John Bogna on October 10th. Since I have both an Apple iPod Touch using iOS 15 and a Samsung smartphone using the latest release of the Android OS, it was appreciated that both systems have similar apps.
The app uses the smartphone’s exposure sensor to show what range of settings can be used on the film camera. This way, the smartphone becomes a hand held light meter (sensitivity depends on the smartphone used). Now film geeks can use an app on their smartphone to set their film camera and get a decent exposure, Neat!
