DIGITAL LIGHTING

I am going to be using fluorescent, continuous lighting for my digital portraits. Do I need to invest in a light meter for this, or would the TTL metering work ok?

Thanks!

theloanexperts wrote in post #2287029
I am going to be using fluorescent, continuous lighting for my digital portraits. Do I need to invest in a light meter for this, or would the TTL metering work ok?

Thanks!

Be EXTREMELY careful with using flourescent lighting. If the ballast is working at line frequency (60 Hertz in North America and 50 Hertz in a lot of the rest of the world), the intensity and color of the light will be changing at twice the line frequency and you will have a really frustrating time getting your images to look good.

Even if you find flourescent lighting that runs at a high frequency, there may not be the full spectrum of color from the lighting that you would hope for. That will cause all sorts of problems with getting true-to-life colors in your images.

As for the metering question, you can use the in-camera meter but it won't be as effective as a handheld meter that can take incident readings. Another way to emulate what an incident meter can do is to use a fairly large standard 18% gray card and a reflected-light meter. The meter in your camera would work for this, but is not nearly as convenient to use as a handheld meter. You will soon tire of taking the camera off the tripod to take readings with every change in lighting.