Hi

It seems the profiles for the sekonic meter have mysteriously disappeared from the sekonic website.

Has anyone in the meantime downlowded the 5D profile they could send me?

Many thanks

Jane

Maybe I'm missing something here, or I'm just old fashioned, but would someone kindly explain to me what on earth the point of these are and more to the point, are they realistically of any use?

The sales guy at Calumet NYC who sold me a L308 a couple of months ago would also like to know

I got curious about this and a quick Google search netted this at Amazon:


Product Description
Up to three different exposure profiles (digital cameras and / or films) can be stored at the same time in the L-758DR and recalled with a quick keystroke. Each exposure profile contains the unique exposure characteristic of a type of film or digital camera sensor. Using the included Sekonic Data Transfer Software and the provided USB cable with the Digital Master, exposure profiles can be loaded into the L-758DR through its built-in USB port. Exposure profiles can be acquired through a four-step exposure test using this Sekonic test target.

The cost was $98.85. Seems like a bit of overkill to me just to apply a bit of exposure compensation to a light meter.

Mmm. I can sort of see the possible advantage for film types, but digital? - I tend to use another system called Take Another Exposure

Hi

Thanks to Paul Whitaker on Fred Miranda,

the profiles are to be found on the Japanse website in case anyone wants them too

http://www.sekonic.co.jp/English/product/m.../download.shtml.


why use a light meter? well I have never used film, I feel there is a whole gap in my understanding and I am slowly working backwards to understand the medium. I may even get into film.. hey I'm even thinking about buying a pin hole camera:)

Jane

I don't own an L758 but I'm totally appreciative of the concept, which I understand as follows:

A digital SLR has goodies like post-exposure histogram and blinking blown-highlight display ... but both are necessarily based on the camera's hard-coded JPEG processing engine. If you do raw, you can set the JPEG parameters to low contrast and low saturation and hope for a decent correspondence to the latitude of your raw converter. Or you can take the high road, use an L758, and simply nail your exposure from the git-go.

As I recall, an L758 profile is something you create interactively with the light meter to determine the DR/latitude or your camera model. Once the light meter knows your camera has 8.3 stops DR and the "mid" point is 2.7 stops below the blown-highlights point, you can easily meter any scene to find the actual correct exposure, not just a reasonable approximation thereof. Expose-to-right being built into the equation. (Of course, action shots may or may not give you that few-second window to put all this goodness to use.)


The legacy of film is over 150 years long. The majority of movers and shakers in photography were weaned on film photography and assume a shared vocabulary and experience with film in their communications. By all means expose yourself to this rich legacy if you can. The downside is that film still has the upper hand in certain areas - I"m thinking especially of colour gradations - so there may actually be a small but very real danger of your being seduced into the retro side of the force.

I've got the meter and played around with the target but I think I need a serious conversation with the product manager and more info. For one, you're told to shoot a bracket of this target, then find one with a value of 118 for a certain gray patch based on exposure and your raw processing. That will not work since we have working spaces with different tone response curves (gamma curves). If you're shooting the same image and using ProPhoto RGB (1.8 TRC) versus Adobe RGB (2.2), the SAME image from the converter will produce very different values for that patch.

2nd, I don't think this calibration takes the expose to the right into consideration either. On brackets that looked 2 stops over, I could easily use the Lightroom exposure slider to get the image back into perfect appearing exposure with far less noise in the shadows. IOW, you need to know where to place the exposure based on the raw converter and its rendering abilities. A plus 2 stop image initially looks awful in LR but you can normalize it and make a preset. As long as you don't over expose the highlights, you're better off targeting for that end of the scale. I don't see how the target calibration process as described (and the instructions are not so good) takes this vital process into consideration. I have a lot to learn about the product and initially I think the approach taken will work, I just don't think its totally thought out, certainly not with respect to the color space of your images.

I want to expose for the raw, I could care less how the image appears on the LCD or JPEG (which I don't use). IF you expose for the LCD or JPEG, you're not exposing for the best raw qualities!

Read Michael's Expose Right article. IF you're shooting Raw, the exposure you're getting based on film designed light meters is providing inferior data. The LCD and JPEG you get from a DSLR and the raw data are not at all based on the same exposure needs.

Hi, guys ... i downloaded the profile, loaded it to the meter and now it is 1.2 stops off from the camera !!!

WTH ?

I made several ICC profiles for the 5D and got back some very strange user complaints regarding exposure. My feeling is that there is considerable variation between individual cameras - more precisely I suspect two different batches are in circulation.

Edmund

In my workshop yesterday someone brought the new Sekonic loaded with the profile for the 5D and it was off.

Best thing is to make your own profile.

Buy the cheap QPCARDS, they are perfect for this.

Place the card lit by a BROAD lightsource and measure your card.
Now take the shot.
Use a RAW convertor that is camera native, Mamiya DS, DPP, Capture One etc.
It HAS to have a histogram viewer with a MIDPOINT and it HAS to be totally neutral, don't trust lightroom or ACR because they show you an underexposed histogram while it's not.

Now crop the white and gray patch and do a whitebalance on the gray patch.
if you are measuring correct the gray patch should be dead center and the whites should not overexpose.
If the gray is not deadcenter adjust your meter for compensation.

A few pointers.
Use a GOOD flash system, forget it with falcon eyes, Jinbei or whatever chinese brand, when you measure six pops you will get six different outcomes. I use Elinchrom and I know profoto and those two brands are 100% accurate every pop.
But you can check this of course yourself.

Remember that you have to this for EVERY ISO and EVERY BODY and sometimes even every lens although with lenses the difference is often very very minor, but especially some cheaper brands and step in lenses will differ.

Is it a lot of work ?
Actually not.
In the studio you often use one body, and one ISO setting.
On location I always trust my camera meter unless I use mix lights when I'm (you guessed it) back on the same ISO I use in the studio.

I will have a chapter on this on the new instructional DVD by the way

Hi
Does that mean I need the strobe system to do the calibration?
thanks,

I tried this on my Profoto and found that my profoto (at least) one pack and heads is shooting almost 1/3 difference between Pops!!
That is why I could not calibrate my meter this way either.
Going to try again on my other "newer" Profotos to see if they are different.
Snook