Metered Light Pocket Spot Meter Tip

I’ve been using my little Pocket Spot Meter now for a few months and I really like it, except for when I am trying to read value next to another value with a huge different in brightness… think snow in the sun next to a deep shadow from a tree. The narrowness of the tree makes a perfect reading difficult if you follow the direction that came with the meter for normal operation (“hold the meter 12 inches from your eye and sight through the hole”)…

Today I came up with a better solution… just tip the meter up a bit and put more of the circle in the value you are trying to meter. Placing the 1 degree viewing sight exactly above or below the dividing line between to extremes values will result in a bad reading but doing what the photos below illustrate works perfect… note how in photo 2 the viewing hole is now somewhat elipical in nature… this is what you want. I checked this process out against my trusted Pentax Digital Spot Meter and my Sekonic L758DR Spot meter and in both cases all three meters were in agreement… yeah!