Measure Light – The quest for a light meter for analogue photography – Part One

Light Meter
Light meter with a FTDI USB – Serial Interface for sw development

I love analogue photography, even more when it’s with fully mechanical medium format cameras, such as the Flexaret Automat VII, and the Hasselblad 500c.

However, where are some situations where the correct exposure is difficult to determine. On such cases, one could use a second camera for TTL metering (such as DSLR), a phone app…or a light meter.

On my location, an new sektronick light meter price varies from 109 € to 600 € depending on the model. On ebay you could get an used, cheaper , vintage light meter, but your mileage might vary.

So since the price and availability of light meters were not to my liking, I’ve decided to build my own from scratch, based on an arduino board, with some help of Pedro Virtebo, at Maquinas de Outros Tempos.

Bear in mind this is not the first or last time anyone has done something similar, a simple google search show a ton of similar projects, with different levels of polish. But just implementing these would not give me enough understanding of how a light meter works.

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