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Light Metering Q&A

Okay tons of questions tons of christian is from london cat will you believe get mark to explain tenth stops on the late meter yes ten stop increments okay, so on this meter and some meters you can have tenth stop increments a stop is either twice as much or half assed much power and so sometimes you want to beam or accurate than that you don't want to just say I need twice as much like you want to say I want one tenth of twice as much like ok, go with me about it man one tenth of double the light in other words, I just want a little bit more light and I want to be very, very accurate. Three tenths is a third stop, right? Six tends to third stops and so if you really really need to be extremely accurate when you're meet a ring if you get ten and one tenth of the stop that's just a little bit over ten so if you set your camera of ten, you know that the light is going to be a little bit overexposed. Actually, if you're a ten and two tenths of a stopping you set your camera at ten, you're...

actually closer to eleven then you are ten, so you can sort of learned that right? So that's what that is on pro photo it lights and other digital strobes that I really fancy you can actually adjust them in tenth stop increments on our strokes that I should you're ready, you can only go third stop increments. So the tenth stops really tell you how close you are to which third stop next question is from creative love and they would like to know, is there a way to know how much flash power was used? Well, in tt mo tt helmut um I don't know off hand if there's a way to know that um, yeah, so I I'll see if I can look that up, but I don't know off stop my head okay question from mary from costa rica process so is it better to meet her the light first on full power and then take it down a seated or meter, the lowest power and tee it up was needed? Ok, no that's, it doesn't really matter, um, but what you'll find is with practice, but the certain light you'll knew where to start. And so for example, I used the proposed a d one thousand packs all the time they're they're really powerful and I know when I start I dial them down too about quarter power and start from there, but what I recommend is if you're starting out, put your flash in half half of its power in other words not have power but in the middle of its range which is normally one sixty fourth full power because then you can still go down tio lower or you can go up so in the middle of its stops and the reason for that is if you meet her and you want to be at a certain apertura range if you're above that you can easily go to the lower stop if you're below that you can usually go up if you find that you're always going up every single time then you know that you need to start at a higher output level on what you'll find over time is that you sort of figured out so we know based on what we just found out the next time we set up this easy box with a um with the canon five eighty x to if we wanted a portrait head shot and we wanted to be around eight or f nine that we need to be around full power half power could we just saw that and so we know that now on that's sort of what happens is the more you use a specific light the more familiar you are with it I have a question here from someone from oregon but I don't see their name here if you're meeting for a group photo do meter in several different areas and if so, where yes, yes, yes. So we'll do that tomorrow will go through, but normally and I'll pretend that there's a group of people back here. So here's michael and so normally, if I'm eating, I'm looking for holes in the light, so I'll meet her here. I'll move overall meter here I'll move overall meter here I'll just keep meat oring and I can see if there any changes I could meet her high, give me low and I can see exactly where the light is falling because you can't see with your eyes like from a flash. In fact, you can't even see it through your lens when you take the picture because the mirror is up in a block your vision when the flash is fired, and so this is a great way of meeting like some meters like this one, you can push, um with ambient light, not with strokes, but with aniela, you can just push and hold and move it around, and it will change an update as you're going on when we like for like green screens and things like that, where we need to haven't even background or for lighting for like a seamless white or portrait will do exactly that well, meter, meter, meter, meter and we'll see where the holes are and it's pretty amazing once you use a light meter for a little while you could meet her meeting the oh gosh we need more like here and you can move your umbrella or whatever that does take practice it's not something you're going to go tomorrow and go ok did you do got it so yeah it'll take some practice yeah not didn't so question from harley d w g forty four who's in new mexico when using radio triggers do you need to turn off standby mode so the flash will fire when you want to capture action of an expression yeah you do so watch this my flashes and firing why because it fell asleep so now I have to turn it back on and now little fire yeah so you have to turn off to standby mode on your flash there is a feature on the new plus threes that you can use to wait flashes and stuff up but um yeah yes turn it off turn it off also external battery back I can't sing their praises high enough have a question from deal richards photo who's from england and he says on some light meters I know you can move the white blob at the front technical term l a well what does it mean when you move the white blob white blob yes, the little white down the loomis fears that's called atmosphere so on this one I can twist and it retracts the hemisphere. All right, twist. And that loomis fear comes out on the light. Meter's you were talking about, uh, the little white blob khun b we slid over. And what that does is essentially the same thing is retracting the loomis here. So it's it's moving out. And why would you do that? Loomis fear noticed that it's a dome similar to my head. Was that on? What it's doing is is gathering light one hundred eighty degrees and it's all around from the light. This bouncing off the floor of the lights is coming from the ceiling. The light is going straight into the light. The lights is coming this way. It's going it's getting all of the light that's that's hitting our subject from all directions that it can. Because that's how light travels right. When you take a picture, someone that's gonna bounce some of it's going to be around on dh so it averages all of that light if you put this down, what is happening when you meet her? The light it's on ly monitoring the like this going straight in that's it only the light this coming straight in and so you can use that for a couple of things if you're may metering something that's flat like a piece of artwork but you know it's only going to get like that's coming straight in and you put the limits fear down but the way that most photographers portrait photographers use that is so sir come on over here let's have you right here let's pretend that I have this light and two or three other lights and I need to see the relationship between those lights. I need to see how bright is this light in relationship to this light this up here? Well, what I would do is I would put this down take a meter reading pointing it at the light see how bright that is and then I would take another meter reading pointing this at another light see how bright that is and then I can tell the difference is in the power outputs of those two lights to establish a lighting ratio and then I could change those those things so that by the way is on the studio lighting essentials that digital download stuff because it is something that can take quite a while to learn and that's that's one of the big pieces of that that download and we will be given one of those away later this afternoon yeah, keep tweeting yeah, so it's something we're not going to be doing in this course because it's a little beyond the scope of it because it's one o one but yeah that's the resource for that cool okay wait a couple of questions little questions about the battery power and that is from one is from caroline van veto in lake havasu, arizona to save battery power is it better to use the zoom instead of taking the power up? No, I don't it's not worth it because what you're doing is when you change the zune you're changing the properties of light in using a flash or using that flash tio give flattering light and so to save some dollars on batteries and ruin your life isn't worth it in my opinion, so yeah, I get an external battery pack or shoot not as fast it's just par for the course and you're gonna you're gonna use some batteries can the second one from helios chat is well shooting in manual health this speed bite recycle faster since it has less to do it won't help it well, it may be marginally faster because the pre flash isn't firing so it's not using quite debt amount of energy but I don't think you're going to see a significant difference ok, so we're going we're going to do a different scenario here we're going to try to meet her at two point eight okay, we're gonna try to point eight okay, so colby I'm gonna have you do the light meter good, okay so come on all right, so I'll put this in your hand don't be shy so go on over and let's I'm gonna turn this I'm gonna wait this up because it's still so go ahead and meter that like remember? Is it ok if I hold the meter like this and I blocked yeah except for don't ask don't tell smudgy so yeah there we go so point that this way towards the flash toward toward the camera right here there you go and push the button what does it say tend to tend to ok, so you move just a hair that's what happened and this is also a great reason to have the tenth stop uh uh increments so we were first needed it was ten point one remember now it's ten point two which means it's a little bit brighter and we're on the edge of being overexposed and so what we use the meter for aa lot is making sure our models are the same exact place they were before to take a half step back like that a little bit more now meter it one more time ok, so it is that accurate right to see just a little bit and so when we're meeting sometimes we'll take a break during a shoot or something and what we want to make sure our light is exactly the same our light meter khun tell us if the person is in the place they were when we took our break and so it's it's almost more accurate is than putting a smudge on the floor to tell you where to stand so we do that for ten but what do we want to be yet to eight okay what are we going to do? What what what should we do? Lower the power of the flash lower the power of the flash yes why don't we just move to flashback here this way? Because the cheese is the quality of the light right? So it's going to change that it's going to have a broader through it's not going to contrast that we have and so we'll do kim kind of come on over here come on over when I put you on this side of the light so we're not blocking a camera so push the center button there and then roll that down just keep rolling it down is keep rolling it with gusto let's get to about uh one thirty second of full power right there yep and then just hit ok? Yeah, so go left three more clicks one to three thirty okay hit ok now let's meet or the like what is that one point two one point eight one twenty eight were close so what do we need more a little bit more power so yeah let's take that up there you go say ok so we went up one stop let's try that uh two to three to two three said the one third stop more power there you and let's try it two eight one two point eight and one tenth ok yeah so uh with some practice you'll learn where that needs to be it'll be cool well done have a seat all right uh we're gonna take our picture now you pointing is where we were at dial this down to two point eight there we go ok want to take my shot give me a big smile every good yeah good, good good it ok so let's compare if we can the shot that we took originally with the shot we just took it two point eight and let's see if we can see that on the screen those two shots so we have sam vantage of the model peeking in which is sort of creepy something like a okay so what happened? How come on the first shot we had no sam kicking in and on the second shot we did you're letting more ambient lighting yes, we're letting him or ambient light it's on the first shot this picture was totally dark because it's illuminated by ambient light on the second shot because we haven't a wider aperture mohr ambient light is seeping in and this showed up now watch this who has the meter okay take a look at this will show you this on we have a clue that's telling us that could happen right up here that says ninety percent which means that at ninety percent of the light is coming from the flash and ten percent is coming from ambient light just like we saw upstairs and so we will know if this doesn't say one hundred percent that we're going to get some ambient light see pinch we'll know that what if we wanted even mohr ambient light to come in I don't want to meet her again I just want to know I can do this really cool thing the meter already knows all about the light in the room it knows the flash exposure and it knows the ambient light exposure because already measured it now watch this I want to know how slow I need to make the shutter to have about forty percent of the light come from the ambient light watch how easy this is and this is why I love light meters this is my shutter speed I will roll this down lower lower lower at twenty fifth of a second sixty percent of the light is coming from her ambient light but my light meter is smart enough to tell me that I need to set my aperture to three point six or I'm going to be over exposed because the ambient light is basically coming in too much so that its delight meter is using the inverse square law it knows it was yeah it knows all and knows all yeah and so the thing with the light meter it's very it's pretty smart I love like meters because you're you're doing something very simple you're saying this is why I so this is my shutter speed tell me what happens for value to use how much of that is coming from my flash and how much of that is coming from ambient light it will tell you that and then you can make changes to your shutter speed and it will tell you how that impacts your aperture and how much for the impacts your ambient light and you don't ever have to do any experiments to see what's going on so we know that if we roll this down tio what do we say sixty something like that yeah that we got eighty percent right our twenty five so we know we have to go to three point two we know that that we've got sixty are forty percent of light is going to be ambient we know that a twenty fifth of a second we're gonna have blur issues we already know without ever taking a picture of what is going to look like we know that we have too much ambient light we have picture that's got blur in it and it's not gonna have those characters six that we want fact let's prove it I'm to go to three point six at twenty fifth of the second. Okay, you can't go to three point six is three point five, so we'll have to fudge it just a little bit came so I know when I take this picture, I'm gonna have way too much ambient light and it's gonna be blurry, and I'm gonna lose that awesome look that we had no recent, my flash. Here we go. Yeah, they're awesome. So here we are if we zoom in on this and I don't know if you're going to see this, we're going to see that it looks similar. But if we tried to be critical, you can see it's blurry it's blurry don't know if you guys can use the zoom on the on light room to show you this, but we've got too much ambient light. We've lost that nice look that we had and we have an image. That's marie yeah, exactly. So and we knew that before we never took the photo and with some practice with a lightning er I think what you'll find is you want to fire the ninja because a ninja will never tell you this stuff to pre flash isn't gonna tell you that stuff I mean you'll know by looking at her settings that your shutter speed is too low but you won't know what the ratio between ambien you'll just have to sort of figure that out the ninja has moved into the meter and it took up residence and it got schooled on now it is the master I'm the grasshopper okay before we go to the tamar levin light metering methods do we have I'm sure we have questions, questions, questions so we've got enough time for about two questions before we go on to do that tomorrow levin light metering method okay, yes, we should try to make him good then yeah, you know what? Let's let's let's camp on this list let's do some questions and then we'll just we'll shift some things so I want to make sure because I think I get the sense that people are really eager to learn this is that correct? Yes. Okay let's camp on it and we'll we'll do our will shift some things in our schedule. I like that saying let's camp on camp on this campaign if I would sit on this is getsem handles and put it on this so we can pick it up and carry it with this all right a question from logan zillow omar and that is using an umbrella should you zoom to thirty five millimeters wide or telly one hundred millimeters yeah ok so I like to zoom so I can fill that umbrella unless I'm losing too much power and so tomorrow when we do portrait we'll see freaking weaken camp on that one but we want to make sure that we have the umbrella filled with enough light without it spilling and not lose enough power but if we if we zoom too much we're gonna lose the benefit of having an umbrella too. Two bells all that light yeah question from wenatchee photo chick why are you not using the percentage on the light meter as well if you shoot at I s a one hundred and one one hundred's well seventy percent give you the right exposure as well. Well, theseventy the percentage is only telling us what the ratio between ambient light in the flashes it's not telling us if we have a correct exposure or not. And so the reason that percentages there is if you if you define a style of photography or if you have a request where somebody says, you know what? I want to make sure that I have uh mostly ambient light with just a little bit of catch lights from my flash well, then you know your flash should only be maybe twenty percent of the exposure just a little taste for that it's not defining if the exposure is correct or incorrect it's just telling me what the mixes and so you can have a correct exposure at ten percent and you can have a correct exposure at one hundred percent it's just how are the two exposures mixed that's that's always telling you so either way it's going to be correct all right so we've had several people including new dog ask about the difference between incident metering and reflective media ring and will that affect the picture? Yes ok excellent that is a really, really good question incident meeting let me tell you why the ninja doesn't know it's because reflected metering causes issues rewind your brain till yesterday maybe this is still there yeah it's still here awesome okay reflected metering works like this remember? It doesn't matter if it's a light meter or through the lens monitoring both use eighteen percent or middle grade to figure out the exposure. Ok, so why why is a light meter more accurate here's why this is expected to be middle gray and so when you use reflected media ring and this one, by the way does reflected me during this is why you can look through this. This is little periscope guys you can see through what happens is light is reflected off the surface and it goes through the lens of the camera that's what through the lens or it can go through the lens of a meter like this one so this is reflective meeting and it is expecting to come in and then that's when it's translated into middle grade so if you have something that's, why it's going to translate it incorrectly as gray if you have something that's predominantly black it's goingto incorrectly translate that to middle gray and so will be over exposed or under exposed right? So that's reflected media ring that's what our pre flash uses that's what our through the lens metering uses and that's something that can get get the image they exposure on this has no idea what's behind it and it doesn't care it's actually seeing the light the physical light that's falling at this place and so when you take a meter reading from this it will be accurate because it doesn't care if this is white or black or deep green or purple or blue or whatever it doesn't have any of those issues of having to see a reflection of something and misinterpreting it it's actually measuring the light itself not the light as reflected off of something and so this is much much more accurate incident metering is much more accurate because it's not thrown off by reflections another thing we could have let's say this is a highly glossy surface if we had a light source that was glaring like maybe a building or a mirror or window or a car some chrome, that kind of stuff well that can go as a reflective meet oring that glare can go into the lens and fool the through the lens monitoring to think that something is really bright if I had something that was highly reflected and I meet it in front of that it doesn't even see those so this is going to get it right almost always in fact I've never had it not get it right um so this is highly highly accurate question is why would you would you meet her all the time? There is a phenomenal a documentary called war photographer about james knocked way watch it it's awesome but he has this meter right here going to steal it he has this meter okay and he's got the meter around his neck like this and he's got it in his pocket and he's got his his camera and he's in a war zone well it's because of you guys throwing molotov cocktails and all kinds of crazy things and you see him meter the light changed his camera in manual mode in a war zone and it's crazy so you can watch this documentary and you can see him and he manually meters with a light meter in a war zone and he always has and I think man, if that guy is thinking that that is the correct way to meet her and it gets it absolutely right then I'm sure I can figure out easily so using a light meter isn't practical if you're shooting something like a wedding right, you're not going to go up to the brighton excuse me, right take a meter reading but what you can do is you can set the light in advance so you can do things in advance on a lot of things and lock that in and you can set your you know, if you can set up some lights in advance remote control them, set them to a specific power and now you're not worried it's going to be right every time. All right? Ok, more questions. Yeah. Let's take one. Are you sticking to the question? Just one more question. I think you have a question from lone ranger in san diego who would like to know for all of the impoverished photographers out there can you use your camera as a hand meter? You cannot it's always going to be through the lens meeting, but tomorrow levin metering method let's go there because that's what that is that's what that is that's how she rolls. Okay, so, um I have this little show called how they do that it's on youtube you can see it where we interview photographers all over the place and one of the people that we interviewed her name is tomorrow levin and I was in hollywood and I was sitting down at her backyard is really amazing place and I was interviewing her and she does fashion photography for magazines and it's just this incredible stuff and so I asked her how she meters her subjects just sort of you know, uh offhandedly I asked her about, you know, some of her meandering techniques and she said, I never use a light meter well to me it's like, oh no, you know, I was like, I can't believe that you don't use a light meter and she said here's how I do it so I call this the tomorrow levin metering method and it is perfect for impoverished photographers I think all photographers hurt profits right don't know any rich photographers but anyway so here's how she does it, she says, I take a picture with my camera is using the through the lens meet oring and get the ambient light the way I want it to be she always works from the ambient light first and then she just adds lights and takes pictures and adjusts it to taste by just looking at her screen she never meters the light she just looks and says whom I think a little more light there would be good click vessel too much and so you could do that one of the issues with that is if you're in bright a very, very bright environment like we were upstairs outside on the rooftop it was interesting because we were shooting those and I was looking at the back of the screen and you know, we mentioned don't trust that it was like, ok, you know, that looks good when we came back for lunch then I looked at him in the normal light here is like, oh, wow that's pretty cool so we had no idea what that looked like, so if you're going to be doing that methodology outside, what I suggest is that you get like a goodman or something that covers your lcd panel so you have a more accurate presentation make sure that your lcd panel isn't cranked all the way up to full blast because you can set it to really bright or not so bright and then even better if you could take a laptop on location with you or even an ipad with a camera connection kit or something like that on dh then shield that with something so that you can see it that that's going to be even better. I want to try doing that tomorrow, levin light metering method and we'll see how well it works for you for it okay, so what we're gonna do is let's say we want to add we want to shoot you with nice soft light, but I want to add um some highlights to the back of her hair, ok that's what I want to go so what I'm gonna do first is I'm just gonna use my eyeballs and see what we see so come on over here I know that you guys can't see this but up here there's a big huge video light so let me have you step back just a bit more about right there okay yeah, that looks good in a little bit all right, so we have light coming from this angle from this light way up here that I'm not sure these guys can see but it's up there so that is going to be my key light and I'm going to start from that point and my first impulse was let me get my life right now the oh my light meter was like addicted so we're going to do here is take this so kelsey, could you come grab this? We're going to use this as the the kicker light so just take that over there so I'm not going to use anything but my cameras media ring to figure this out okay? That's all we're gonna do and so that's going to need to go off to your right camera left and when it first take the picture here and figure out what I needed to be I'm in manual mode I'm using the built in light meter I'm going to shoot this I'm going to say at four point five white four point five well because I want shallow depth of field amusing my twenty four to seventy millimeter lens I know that between fifty and seventy millimeters at four point five at this distance I'm going to start to have focused fall off anything that's wider than that I'm gonna have focus issues I might have some issues because I'm not using a tripod so I'm going to go with four five okay so I'm going to just look through here I'm zooming in just a bit and I'm seeing that my shutter speed at four five really has to go down to a quarter of a second to get a good exposure so what do I d'oh one of my three things exactly I need more I esso out of this guy so I'm gonna take my eyes so up to eight hundred I also update eight hundred now when I look through my shutter speed I can get it up to fortieth of a second which still isn't really fast enough but with this five d mark to I don't want to go any higher than that so I'm just going to open up my aperture a little bit and where he was going to go with a little bit shallow depth of field so three point five I can get to sixtieth of a seconds following me all right? Yeah expose your trying queen but somebody take my picture I designed I wish I had my seventy two two hundred with this one but we have a nice soft light with this shot we have the creative live background back there so there is a nice soft light um I need to fix my white balance something to you that really quickly so we'll take one more shot I'm just putting my camera on fatah white malice it was on flash and you'll see that as soon as you got auto this will go from red to more balanced natural to see that get my white balance was off so now we have soft light we have catch lights here from this light above what I want though is I want to highlight behind her so kelsey let's have you come on out and turn on the flash okay, now I have this pocket wizard that can trigger the flash okay and then we're just going toe take a picture and see what it looks like how does that look all right this is this is gonna be easy force assumes this pops up the first thing you're going to think is too much light right too much like how much light is that so let's let's take a guess we can still see the individual hairs for the most part in her hair all right we can see that which means it's not totally absolutely blown out if it wass we wouldn't see any detail at all okay so we know we're close but we also know and we have this highlight here that sort of nice but look up here this light is falling off there's no light here that means that the light needs to be raised a little bit maybe pointed down we don't have we can't point that down correct uh no okay so we might have to just go with what we have right now but ideally we would point it down a little bit I'm going to say that this using my intuition we need to come down by one stop so what's the output of the power right now one sixteen and one third so one sixteenth so let's go toe one thirty second as if that's a stop so we're going half is much power ok? And I'm gonna push this to make sure that I'm recycling my flash to make sure that it's at the right output and then I'm gonna come back up here I live let's take a peek at this so we just guessed using some um experience uh nice right that worked and so we used some experience to figure this out so let me show you this blown out thing here that I was talking about so go ahead and get a full power I want you to understand what I mean by not being able to see the details so that was the clue of you know if it was totally blown out or not we can see those hairs there so what we'll do here is now we have it at full blast I'm gonna take another shot and notice what happens to sarah's hair this is sort of a cool shot actually so watch what happens to syria's here so there is no information here none which means we're way up also see how this contrast just went way way way way what looks like shouting outside yeah so this contrast went way down because there's a lot of light coming into the lens that's what's going on there and so this is sort of like that sun city kind of picture also noticed that the color temperature is off because now most of light is coming from the flash and so what we can do here is we can do I'm not gonna get into but we could do all kinds of stuff with this we could go with it but to figure out how much light is coming in here we first want to see if we can see details and until we can see details were knew we knew were way over exposed once we can see details now we can tune that back down so let's go the other way so let's go down to one hundred twenty eight full power which is one stop below where the good stuff was right? Okay trust me, I'm really bad at math, so if I can do this, you can do it too, so we're making sure our flashed on fire so we're looking right in the lens. Beautiful. Okay, now look this I love it. So this is just a very small kiss of light right here. See that it's a very small kiss of light, which is this really all we need for something like this so we can start just looking and using her eyeballs to see is this enough light? Do we need more? Do we need less? And so that is a style of photography that can work if I try to do this in tl mode, we would just be chasing our tail basically all day because I maybe put the exposure compensation and then if I shot that picture we had all that light coming in the lens. Then the camera would meet her that it's too much it would take that light down. But maybe if I a shot at where then the light wasn't in the land that would change it to something else and we just keep changing things that wouldn't get to where we want to be manual mode let's, just stick it and keep it and shoot it and adjust to that okay way have enough time for a couple more questions before our break okay, kim's gonna question usually just leave it and auto or do you change it depending on the lighting conditions outside or inside? It depends on what I'm shooting if I'm shooting a first of all I unless I absolutely have to I always shoot in wrong. Oh, geez, well, I'm not just for the ability to change white balance, but also it preserves the highlights and shadows in a way that we can pull out later on. I love postproduction and I'm a big aven supporters of do some things in posts, fix it in post, but make it final and most so right, I recommend that so I always do my best to get the white balance correct while I'm shooting, I don't care too much about getting it correct specifically that the white balance is set correctly for the for the situation, but what I mean by correct in my situation is I want to make sure that the white balance for the ambient light and the flash are close is possible because that's something that's that's very difficult to fix in post you have these masks and all kinds of things to do that, so I want to make sure that they're equal and then in post if I want to in light room or photo shop. We're aperture whatever you're using you can warm things up or cool things down so one of the things specifically about white balance that it is important I think to understand is like architectural photographers work really hard to get all of the white balance stuff to be exactly the same and so you'll have a house that is amazing house and it will look sterile and white and so nobody wants that you don't want to look like you're buying a hospital right so what you do is you get all the different color temperatures all the lamps all the light coming in from the windows get it all the same and then you adjust that to be beautiful so then you warm it up or cool it down or do whatever you want to make that uh represent the emotion that you want in the photo so this stuff that we shot last night at the secret location secret place way warmed it up so we took the correct color temperature and then adjusted it so it's warmer because we want people who look like they're from phoenix not seattle you know right now okay uh question from w r lee it's more of a clarification actually they say yesterday you taught us techniques that treated like control and meet a ring of ambient versus flash separately today with the aid of a meter and you are no longer treating them entirely separately is that true no, they are separate. They are definitely separately. We'll always be separate. So, uh, yeah, they're separate. And so what we did is when we went over here, I think we started and maybe I miss remembering this, but we said we want o overpower the ambient light. We're throwing out the ambient light by using fast shutter speed and closing down the aperture. And so by overpowering, the average lightened as words severely under exposing the ambient light, we don't really have to care about it anymore. Um, and so in a studio environment, the amulet is so low that you can sort of forget about it, but they're always there. And then also remember when we did the percentage thing over here where we had sam peeking into the photo, we talked about that the ambient light was being raised or decrease and that's why she was showing up and going away because that ambient light was peeking into the flash exposure. So yeah, they're still separate on. And also the percentages on the the meter show us what the mix between those two things are. So I think the question really, um originates from the question of when I metered I was only me during one exposure triangle. Right I was on ly mita ring for the flash I think that's the confusion what about the meeting for the ambient light and that's why we have that percentage that just says here's how much of that is from your ambulance but yeah we couldn't meet her definitely ambient light and then meter the flash or we could just do it all together with her meter with the percentages the other they're always separate great thanks a lot, marc we have a couple of folks asking about great card so this particular question from hose neo is is it possible to meet her with the camera at a great card and consider that mattering as incident reading yes kelsey do we have a great card? Yes yeah watch this. I'll show you exactly what you're talking about because that's a really good technique and, um I think it's funny I'm just shouting off into space and kelsey comes and that she appears okay great card this is a great card and this one should be replace because it's so old but this is a great card these air extremely expensive this is six dollars for this one um and you should replace these about every year or so but what this does is if you point your camera had thiss this is eighteen percent gray and so the light that's reflected from this is going to be correct so, here's, what we're gonna do? Just what? I need you to help me on this. You've got that share, bro. So you're the one gonna have to sit stand up all the time. So, let's, move this around here. Let's do our test again that we did yesterday. So I want you to hold that just for a second, so I'm gonna I'm gonna take this, uh, camera. We're going to do the exact same thing we did on day one yesterday guess. Um, yeah, it feels like three days ago, doesn't it? It's crazy. So I won't take a picture of of this using aperture priority men leading the way built in meter figure it out. So I'm gonna take my shot. There is the shot. It shows up as gray. Gray. Correct? Great. Great, great. All right, if I put it on manual media ring here just so we can dial the sin. So I'm gonna dial the sin at three point five. This tells me I need to be at three hundred twentieth of a second. Okay, so I did this manual mita ring. So it told me three hundred twentieth of a second and is great still gray, correct, all right, josh, hold that great card up there. All right, let's do it horizontally right? And that's to get flat is possible. Now one of the things with this great card is that shiny that's not good you're great card should not be shiny, so we need a better one. So now he's got a point this at my scene here and I'm eating from my great card and it tells me eighty eighth of a second. Okay, take your hand away like this using the great card. White is white. All right, so just using the great card in that scene, uh, got the meeting, right? So it actually gave me a correct exposure because it's expecting gray eighteen percent gray. We have eighteen percent gray it's going to be right now if I just take a picture of the whole thing it's gonna show up as black and white so I didn't change my settings at all. Just pointed it at the black and white board and you can see that metering on the great card gives us a correct exposure. It's black and it's white. So yeah, great cards are meant originally for setting exposure, not necessarily sitting white balance because white balance wasn't set, you would buy film for different environments so goodbye daylight film, goodbye, incandescent film, et cetera so great cards were used to set exposure, not white balance