Incident Meter vs Actual with Studio Lights

[jhankins]

Greetings,

I have recently setup a small in home portrait studio with Alien Bee's lights. I'm using a Sekonic L-358 light meter. I've noticed that the light meters recommended setting tends to be + 1 1/2 to 2 Fstop off typically. (In other words if I use the recommended setting I'll blow out my highlights.

Is what I'm seeing normal? It is at least consistent, so what I've been doing is dropping the output of the lights by 1 1/2 to 2 fstops to meet my depth of field requirements for the shot.

Jim

PS Using Canon 10D and Alien Bees B800 lights

[daveh]

With the same setup (same camera, lights & meter) I'm getting spot-on readings with the out-of-the-box calibration.

There are a couple of ways to recalibrate the meter if necessary. (But triple check your settings first.)

[mjordan]

When I first got my 10D it was 1 stop under exposed from the reading I got from my L-358. My D30 was pretty close as was my EOS 3 and Rebel G with the same light meter. After I upgraded the firmware to 1.01 the camera started underexposing by 1.5 fstops. Always the same.

I am almost positive that my L-358 is accurate and even though I could adjust it to match my camera, it would then be off for any other camera that doesn't have the under exposing problem. Since it's consistant, I just manually adjust for it but I'm hoping that Canon will get it fixed in a future flash update. Hopefully enough people have the problem that Canon will pay attention... even if they fix it without admitting to it. ;D

Mike