Inci­dent-light meters. Inci­dent-light meters mea­sure the amount of light falling on the sub­ject and are only avail­able as off-cam­era, hand­held devices. The most promi­nent fea­ture of inci­dent-light meters is the translu­cent white hemi­spher­i­cal dome (the “lumi­sphere”) that both enclos­es and pro­vides even illu­mi­na­tion to the pho­to­cell with­in, which mea­sures the light’s inten­si­ty. To obtain an expo­sure read­ing, you hold the inci­dent-light meter at the posi­tion of the sub­ject, ensur­ing that the dome is in the same light, point the lumi­sphere towards the cam­era, and take a mea­sure­ment.

Every dig­i­tal cam­era that fea­tures either expo­sure com­pen­sa­tion or a man­u­al expo­sure mode will fea­ture an expo­sure meter either in the viewfind­er, the top LCD pan­el, or both. The expo­sure meter is a sim­ple lin­ear scale of rel­a­tive expo­sure val­ues marked by notch­es, dots, or num­bers, and on some cam­eras, all of the above. The stan­dard expo­sure index, char­ac­ter­ized by the big cen­tral notch, or a zero, always rep­re­sents the opti­mal expo­sure as deter­mined by the camera’s pro­gram­ming. Flank­ing the stan­dard expo­sure index are marks that rep­re­sent incre­ments of 1/3 EV and 1 EV. The marks on the right side rep­re­sent added (or pos­i­tive) expo­sure, and the marks on the left rep­re­sent sub­tract­ed (or neg­a­tive) expo­sure. The expo­sure lev­el indi­ca­tor is the nee­dle or mark­er beneath the notched scale.

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Every reflect­ed-light meter is cal­i­brat­ed to pro­vide an expo­sure read­ing that ren­ders the sub­ject it’s point­ed at as mid­dle grey. If you take a reflect­ed-light read­ing off a black square of paper, the meter will pro­pose expo­sure val­ues that will ren­der the paper mid­dle grey in the pho­to­graph, there­by over­ex­pos­ing it. If you take a reflect­ed-light read­ing off a white square of paper, the meter will pro­pose expo­sure val­ues that will ren­der the paper mid­dle grey in the pho­to­graph, there­by under­ex­pos­ing it. The only tone for which reflect­ed-light meters pro­vide objec­tive­ly accu­rate expo­sure val­ues is mid­dle grey.

Evaluative/Matrix/Multi meter­ing. This is the default and most sophis­ti­cat­ed meter­ing mode on most DSLRs and mir­ror­less cam­eras because it works in a vari­ety of sit­u­a­tions and pro­vides accu­rate results most of the time. It works by divid­ing the frame into mul­ti­ple meter­ing seg­ments and ana­lyzes their bright­ness and, some­times, colour. The result­ing matrix of mul­ti­ple seg­ments is eval­u­at­ed based on com­po­si­tion, colour, and dis­tri­b­u­tion of tones. Nikon cam­eras that fea­ture 3D matrix meter­ing also fac­tor the dis­tance infor­ma­tion pro­vid­ed by the aut­o­fo­cus mod­ules. Some mir­ror­less cam­eras eval­u­ate the scene for the pres­ence of promi­nent faces.

The team installed 222 nm UV sanitizers in the bathroom along with a suite of chemical sensors. “I've never installed state-of-the-art air quality measuring devices in a bathroom,” said Link, first author on the study and patron of the laboratory lavatory. “We had to figure out how to get enough power into the bathroom for these instruments. We had to make sure we had a wireless internet connection so we could monitor our instruments in real time. We even had to consider things like not dropping electrical cords into the toilet.”

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Paper: Michael F. Link, Rileigh L. Robertson, Andrew Shore, Behrang H. Hamadani, Christina E. Cecelski and Dustin G. Poppendieck. Ozone generation and chemistry from 222 nm germicidal ultraviolet light in a fragrant restroom. Environmental Science: Processes & Impacts. Published online May 20, 2024. DOI: 10.1039/D4EM00144C

But this wavelength has its own unique drawback: It turns oxygen in the air into ozone. Ozone itself can be concerning, and it is also highly reactive with other chemicals in the air and creates new secondary compounds.  Link and Poppendieck wanted to know whether the new chemicals could pose a health risk.

For most people, a smelly bathroom is something to avoid. But when the ventilation stopped working in his lab’s hallway bathroom, indoor air expert Michael Link smelled opportunity.

At the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Link and his colleague Dustin Poppendieck study air sanitizers that use ultraviolet light (UV). These devices kill pathogens such as those that cause the flu and COVID-19, but they can also cause unintended chemical reactions in the air.

Togeth­er, the expo­sure meter scale and expo­sure lev­el indi­ca­tor serve one of three func­tions depend­ing on the expo­sure mode you’re using.

When the COVID-19 pandemic began, people started looking for effective ways to control airborne disease in indoor spaces. One promising approach was to use UV radiation. UV is light, but with a wavelength too short for our eyes to detect. Red light has a wavelength of about 700 nanometers (nm); yellow light, 580 nm; and ultraviolet light is between 400 and 100 nms. The shorter the wavelength, the higher the energy. UV light has enough energy to break apart DNA, which is why it’s effective at killing viruses in the air (and why you should wear sunscreen at the beach).

The only thing a light meter can do is mea­sure the actu­al bright­ness of an object; it can make no assess­ment of whether the object is light or dark, in deep shade or in bright sun. It’s up to you to eval­u­ate and inter­pret the nature of your sub­ject accord­ing to the infor­ma­tion pro­vid­ed by the meter. By under­stand­ing how light meters work and are cal­i­brat­ed, you’ll be bet­ter able to use them to deter­mine the appro­pri­ate expo­sure for a scene.

Reflect­ed-light meters. Reflect­ed-light meters work by mea­sur­ing the light reflect­ed off the sub­ject, there­by mea­sur­ing the subject’s bright­ness. Reflect­ed-light mea­sure­ments are tak­en from the intend­ed posi­tion of the cam­era regard­less of whether the meter is on- or off-cam­era. Vir­tu­al­ly every dig­i­tal cam­era meters expo­sure using reflect­ed-light enter­ing the lens, which is known as through-the-lens (TTL) meter­ing.

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Spot meter­ing. The spot meters found in cam­eras are sim­i­lar to those in hand­held light meters. They read light from a small cen­tral area that typ­i­cal­ly com­pris­es one to five per­cent of the frame. On Nikon and most mir­ror­less cam­eras, the spot meter over­laps with the active focus point. On Canon cam­eras, the spot meter is always found in the cen­tre of the frame. Spot meter­ing is both incred­i­bly empow­er­ing and finicky. When using any of the auto-expo­sure modes with spot meter­ing, the cam­era will set its expo­sure val­ues to pro­duce a mid­dle grey ren­di­tion of what­ev­er sub­ject the spot is point­ed towards, and all oth­er tones present in the scene will align accord­ing to their rel­a­tive bright­ness. For this rea­son, using spot meter­ing in any of the auto-expo­sure modes will pro­duce wild­ly incon­sis­tent expo­sures of diverse sub­jects under the same light­ing. For exam­ple, when using auto-expo­sure, spot meter­ing a black dog will pro­duce an expo­sure where the dog appears grey and the scene is over­ex­posed; spot meter­ing a white dog will pro­duce an expo­sure where the dog appears grey, and the pic­ture is under­ex­posed; and, spot meter­ing a grey dog will yield an expo­sure where the dog appears grey, and the scene is cor­rect­ly exposed. Pon­der this point.

The 18-per­cent, or mid­dle grey, stan­dard is the math­e­mat­i­cal aver­age of all tones even­ly dis­trib­uted across a scale from absolute black to absolute white. In dig­i­tal pho­tog­ra­phy, the mid­dle grey tone lies at the pre­cise mid­dle of the lumi­nance his­togram, and there are cor­re­spond­ing mid­dle tones for the red, green, and blue colour chan­nels. (All future ref­er­ences to 18-per­cent grey or mid­dle grey refer to the tone inde­pen­dent of its colour). When print­ed, a mid­dle grey tone reflects 18 per­cent of inci­dent light (i.e., light falling upon it). Pho­to­graph­ic expo­sures derived from meter­ing the aver­age of all tones in an aver­age scene are remark­able at obtain­ing aver­age results.

Reflect­ed-light meter­ing is how cam­eras mea­sure sub­ject bright­ness to deter­mine opti­mal expo­sure. Most dig­i­tal cam­eras offer sev­er­al meter­ing modes that fea­ture vary­ing degrees of sophis­ti­ca­tion. Regard­less of the meter­ing mode, it’s impor­tant to remem­ber that every reflect­ed-light meter, includ­ing your camera’s, is cal­i­brat­ed to pro­vide an expo­sure read­ing that ren­ders the sub­ject as a mid­dle grey tone. The most sig­nif­i­cant dif­fer­ence between the meter­ing modes is in their method of inter­pret­ing the dis­tri­b­u­tion and vari­a­tion of the scene’s tonal range.

After analyzing their results collected over two weekends  — one with ventilation and one without — they found that the 222 nm UV light was producing enough ozone to react with chemicals in the air. The byproducts included formaldehyde, volatile organic compounds and nanoparticles.

Hand­held reflect­ed-light meters come in two broad vari­eties. Wide-angle reflect­ed-light meters take an aver­age read­ing from across a rel­a­tive­ly large area. Spot meters are reflect­ed-light meters that read the bright­ness from a rel­a­tive­ly small por­tion of the scene—typically one degree of your field of view. All hand­held spot meters fea­ture a mag­ni­fied viewfind­er with a clear­ly marked cir­cle that out­lines the meter­ing zone. Spot meters tend to be more expen­sive than both inci­dent- and wide-angle reflect­ed-light meters.

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Aver­age meter­ing. This mode mea­sures the aver­age bright­ness of the entire frame and sets expo­sure to yield a mid­dle grey tone ren­der­ing of that aver­age. This mode pro­duces par­tic­u­lar­ly accu­rate results for land­scapes with the sun out­side the frame. It pro­vides rel­a­tive­ly con­sis­tent expo­sures across mul­ti­ple shots of dif­fer­ent sub­jects under the same light­ing.

Since inci­dent-light meters mea­sure the inten­si­ty of light strik­ing the sub­ject, they pro­vide accu­rate expo­sure infor­ma­tion regard­less of your subject’s inher­ent bright­ness; so long as the sub­jects in your scene are even­ly illu­mi­nat­ed by the same source of light, dark tones will be ren­dered as dark, grey tones as grey, and light tones as light. Fur­ther­more, inci­dent-light meters are incred­i­bly use­ful for mak­ing accu­rate mea­sure­ments in a con­trolled-light­ing envi­ron­ment, such as a stu­dio, and are espe­cial­ly prac­ti­cal when used to cal­cu­late pre­cise con­trast ratios between dif­fer­ent lights.

Auto-expo­sure brack­et­ing range. Expo­sure brack­et­ing is the tech­nique of tak­ing mul­ti­ple expo­sures of the same scene while slight­ly vary­ing the amount of expo­sure between the indi­vid­ual pho­tos. This tech­nique is incred­i­bly use­ful when cap­tur­ing sub­jects with com­plex light­ing, or when you intend to com­bine mul­ti­ple expo­sures into one high dynam­ic range (HDR) image. Auto-expo­sure brack­et­ing (AEB) auto­mates the process with­in a range defined by the user. When AEB is acti­vat­ed, the camera’s expo­sure meter will show mul­ti­ple expo­sure lev­el indi­ca­tors spec­i­fy­ing the AEB range of the con­sec­u­tive shots.

But there’s a drawback to this high-energy UV; it can cause sunburn or temporary blindness. It has to be directed away from people, while still shining on the air they breathe. To use this UV safely, installers must position the lights carefully within ventilation shafts or point them toward the ceiling. This challenge of positioning UV sources is one of the main reasons this form of air purification isn’t used more widely. To avoid that risk, there has been a lot of interest in using less-damaging UV light.

NIST indoor air quality researchers closed a men’s restroom over two weekends to measure indoor air pollution caused by UV air sanitizers.

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Despite the neu­tral­i­ty of inci­dent-light mea­sure­ments, there are sev­er­al inher­ent dis­ad­van­tages you should know about. First, mea­sur­ing the inten­si­ty of light falling upon a dis­tant sub­ject may be dif­fi­cult, imprac­ti­cal, or impos­si­ble. For instance, an inci­dent read­ing of the night sky is impos­si­ble, of a sun­lit moun­tain from an out­look cov­ered by the canopy of trees is imprac­ti­cal, and of a sub­ject under com­plex or mot­tled light­ing is impre­cise. Sec­ond­ly, since inci­dent-light meters mea­sure sub­ject illu­mi­na­tion, the expo­sure val­ues they pro­vide for the aper­ture are in the­o­ret­i­cal f‑stops. If the trans­mis­sion val­ue of your lens is sig­nif­i­cant­ly dif­fer­ent from the the­o­ret­i­cal f‑number it’s set to, the expo­sures won’t be accu­rate (see F‑Stops and T‑Stops).

UV air sanitizers were first widely used in the 1950s to combat tuberculosis. Those early attempts used UV with a wavelength of 254 nm, because that energy level is the most effective at breaking apart DNA and killing pathogens. It is still the most common type of UV air sanitation.

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Expo­sure lev­el indi­ca­tor. In Man­u­al mode, the expo­sure lev­el indi­ca­tor shows how much your set expo­sure val­ues devi­ate from the lev­els the cam­era believes are opti­mal, which always reside at the stan­dard expo­sure index. (See Man­u­al Expo­sure).

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A light meter is a tool that mea­sures light inten­si­ty and aids pho­tog­ra­phers in set­ting the appro­pri­ate expo­sure. Pho­to­graph­ic light meters are avail­able as off-cam­era hand­held devices, and they’re built into vir­tu­al­ly every dig­i­tal cam­era.

They decided to set up their study in a men’s restroom because it had urinal screens — those brightly colored pads placed over the drain to prevent splashing. These screens release fragrances (to mask the odor of urine) that include terpenes, a group of chemicals that reacts strongly with ozone. This study primarily focused on terpenes, but most bathrooms have air filled with chemicals such as cleaners and other scented hygiene products that would also react with ozone.

Ultimately these studies could be used to develop tests for UV air purifiers and guidelines for how to minimize their production of volatile chemicals. This information could ultimately guide decisions on how to best deploy UV sanitizers in a wide range of settings to optimize their benefits to human health.

To fully understand the importance of these chemical byproducts, researchers will need to conduct additional studies to determine how dangerous these pollutants might be, including on a wide variety of indoor spaces and environments that could benefit from the use of UV sanitizers. Other environments are expected to create different kinds of chemicals at different rates, and ventilation could affect how long they will stick around in the air.

Cen­tre-weight­ed meter­ing. This meter­ing mode is designed pri­mar­i­ly for por­trait pho­tog­ra­phy. It con­sid­ers the aver­age bright­ness of the entire frame but gives the great­est promi­nence to the tones in the cen­tral region. Cen­tre-weight­ed meter­ing isn’t rec­om­mend­ed for sce­nar­ios in which mul­ti­ple shots of var­i­ous sub­jects are antic­i­pat­ed, as the expo­sures will fluc­tu­ate.

Link and Poppendieck wanted to know what those reactions looked like in the complex chemical soup of a real restroom. Their latest research, published in Environmental Science: Processes & Impacts, shows that these reactions produce pollutants that could be a health risk. As these sanitizers make their way into our homes and buildings, this research could help guide decisions on using them.

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In the carefully controlled environment of a lab, researchers can precisely measure air chemistry. But people don’t live in stainless steel lab chambers. “Standard lab tests only measure how ozone reacts with one or two pure chemicals,” Poppendieck explained. “In the real world, indoor air has tens if not hundreds of different chemicals that could potentially react in significant concentrations. Michael Link and I talked it over, and he suggested we run a real-world test to help us understand whether these lights are safe.”

Expo­sure com­pen­sa­tion amount. Expo­sure com­pen­sa­tion allows you to increase or decrease image bright­ness beyond what the cam­era deter­mines is opti­mal expo­sure. (See Expo­sure Com­pen­sa­tion). When the cam­era is set to the Pro­gram, Shut­ter Pri­or­i­ty, or Aper­ture Pri­or­i­ty modes, the expo­sure meter shows the amount of com­pen­sa­tion applied in units of EV. When the expo­sure lev­el indi­ca­tor is set to zero, there’s no expo­sure com­pen­sa­tion, and the cam­era reverts to its stan­dard expo­sure pro­gram­ming.

UV light with a wavelength of 222 nm is still effective at killing pathogens, but the shorter wavelength doesn’t penetrate as deeply into human skin, so it’s safe to shine directly on people. Because of this, 222 nm UV light could be used to sanitize the air in small, crowded places like classrooms, elevators and public transportation, places where 254 nm UV sanitizers would be difficult to install easily.