Kickstarter: Lumu Power Is a Full-Featured Light Meter For the iPhone
It measures incident light as well as color temperature and flash exposure
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Using a hand-held light meter isn’t seen as much of an essential skill for photography enthusiasts these days. After all, digital cameras let you get instant results, so it often seems easier to just start firing away. There are some advantages to a dedicated meter, though, and Lumu Power tries to bring those features into a small dongle that plugs directly into an iPhone’s Lightning port.
Once plugged into an iPhone, the small dome works as you’d expect an incident light meter to work. So, you place the meter right around the area you want properly exposed, then take a reading and it will provide you with the settings you need to properly expose that spot. The meter app provides all the exposure and reading information in a simple, but nicely designed interface.
The Lumu Power also measures color temperature in a scene, which may actually be more practically useful than the light meter functionality. A built-in sensor can figure out the type of light in which you’re shooting and give you a reading in degrees Kelvin that you can then use to manually set your color temperature. It’s like the next level up from working with just a gray card.
In addition to simple incidence readings, it can also handle flash readings. However, since the iPhone doesn’t have a sync port and it can’t wirelessly trigger flash systems, it basically just sits ready and waits for the flash to fire manually before it can take the reading.
The Lumu Power also measures color temperature in a scene, which may actually be more practically useful than the light meter functionality. A built-in sensor can figure out the type of light in which you’re shooting and give you a reading in degrees Kelvin that you can then use to manually set your color temperature. It’s like the next level up from working with just a gray card.
In addition to simple incidence readings, it can also handle flash readings. However, since the iPhone doesn’t have a sync port and it can’t wirelessly trigger flash systems, it basically just sits ready and waits for the flash to fire manually before it can take the reading.
It can also measure illuminance in case you want a simpler reading of brightness.
All of the early pre-orders are sold out, so you can’t get it for $149 anymore, but you can get in on the $199 price for the rest of the campaign. The project is already fully-funded with almost a month left to go.
The $200 price tag seems a bit steep for something that may not become an integral part of your photography process, but if it works as advertised, it’s actually a pretty good price for a meter that reads both exposure and color temperature. Plus, it opens you up to buying all kinds of cool old film cameras without built-in meters.
