Photovision 14" Pocket One Shot Digital Target

Works as advertised.

The One Shot is sort of a glorified gray card. You use it in conjunction with your on-camera histogram to get not just a middle gray, but a highlight & shadow reading as w...Read complete review

The One Shot is sort of a glorified gray card. You use it in conjunction with your on-camera histogram to get not just a middle gray, but a highlight & shadow reading as well to make sure you're getting the most value from your scene.

I have a much larger one shot target that I never used - it was far too big. This size is just right - about the size of someone's head. Get them to hold the target up to their face, with the highlight side closer to the light so highlight side is where the highlight on their face will be and take a few test shots, adjusting your camera settings & flash until the histogram tells you that you're getting highlight & shadow detail. You can check for blinking highlights too.

Once this is done, you can set your white balance using this card too - easier on Canons than Nikons - Canons use the center area of the frame from a picture you've already taken (hence the "one shot" name). For Nikons you need to fill the frame with the target & tell it to take a white balance from that. Or you can just take a picture of this somewhere in your shooting session & set the white balance in post.

Each line on your histogram represents one stop, so you can estimate where you have to go from the photo you took - if the highlight spike is 2 stops down, then you need to increase your exposure by 2 stops through a combination of flash power, aperture, shutter speed (for ambient light), flash to subject distance, and film speed. Anything that adjusts in full stops only will get you in the ballpark - anything that adjusts in half or third stops will let you get close to what this will tell you is a perfect exposure- you want all 3 spikes to be fully contained within the histogram - one in the middle (middle gray), one about 1.5 stops bright, and one about 1.5 stops darker, and none of them too close to the edge (so that you're losing detail).

Go through a few tests firsts before using it in the field - you should learn how to read an exposure from this & adjust your equipment accordingly, and what an acceptable reading looks like.

The back side of this is a silver foil that you can use to fill shadows or bounce a highlight on someone's face - but not much more than that, it's a very small reflector and all but useless unless you can clamp it to something & make sure the model doesn't move either. It would be better to get a larger reflector - the larger the better, I say, as long as you can still hand-hold it. I originally got the large size target for the large white reflector in on the back, but that was a mistake - it's too big of a target and not a very versatile reflector (with just white on the back). Still, it'll help in a pinch and I've used it taking photos of small products like handbags.

Another problem with the reflector is that it's silver, meaning it's specular and depending on how you use it, it may become your key light, so you'd be setting your exposure to that. For example if you put your subject in shadow & use the silver reflector to push light from the sky into their face. Well how do you get a reading for the reflected light now coming off of their face? Still, the manufacturer has to do something with the back of the card, and a silver reflector will probably sell more items than a gray card, which may actually be more useful (though would be them admitting that a gray card is just as good if not better in some circumtances). But if you use the reflector as fill (as you may with flash photography) then it won't change the expoosure enough to matter - so I think that's what it's designed for, a fill light reflector for flash photography.

It folds down to about 1/3 its size with a simple twist - hold it on each side in each hand and twist in opposite directions. It comes in a convenient bag made out of some sort of thick canvas-like nylon type material. The bag has an open top (no zipper) and a loop in the back with some velcro, presumably for mounting it on a belt or camera bag (just be careful, with no zipper, if you have it sideways it could fall out).

So how does it differ from a gray card? How is it better, how is it worse? The closest equivalent gray card (the 20" Lastolite) is about the same price and size (but with a white reflector on the back rather than silver - at this size a white reflector isn't very useful), and you can get 8x10 cardstock gray cards much cheaper.

A gray card works in mostly the same way, and in fact is even easier to work with. A gray card is a neutral, middle gray, and you can use the same basic procedure to set your camera's exposure with a gray card.

For natural light photography, you point the camera at the gray card and set the exposure to ±0, and then take a white balance. Bam you're done, no messing with histograms - you can't do that with the one shot target. If you're doing flash photography, then you go through a similar process as with the one shot - checking your histogram for that middle gray spike and trying to get as close to that as possible.

The supposed advantage of the One Shot is that it will tell you if you've blown out your highlights or shadows, but you can generally do that by just looking at a photo you just took and looking for blinking highlights, and the exposure readings it gives you won't be radically different from a gray card.

Still, if you want accuracy in your workflow, it's the same price as an equivalent collapsible gray card, so why not, plus the silver foil back will push more (and more specular) light at your subject than the white back of the Lastolite 20" gray card.

Another thing to be aware of - natural light photographers - sunset light changes very quickly, and the sun going behind clouds change things very quickly too, so when you get a reading with this or a gray card, it could be accurate for mere moments. At times like this I find it better to shoot using an auto exposure mode (program, shutter priority, aperture priority), unless I'm combining flash with ambient, or otherwise want fine control over my exposure - and then I may want to use this to get my flash exposure accurate.

One of the other reviewers mentions that he just "walks up close" to get the correct exposure. This is fine. In fact, you can use this for more than one person - just take a shot for each location you want to expose for - once for each person's face. Exposures don't change if you, the photographer, move around, as long as the light hitting the subject stays the same - e.g. natural light or off-camera flash.

Be aware though that cheap zoom lenses that have different a maximum aperture throughout the length of the zoom will change your exposure as you zoom unless you set it to its smallest maximum aperture or less. This product is really for someone who shoots with good glass - primes or zooms with fixed maximum apertures & in manual mode, but then the same is true for gray card users.

For what it is, it's great, and for flash photography it's as good as a gray card if not better. For natural light photography, a gray card is better because you can get a reading off of it without going to the histogram - just fill your frame with the card and adjust your settings. The silver reflector is a welcome addition, but not as good as a larger reflector and a gray card would be more useful. Is it better than a gray card for getting better exposures? I guess marginally so - if you're into super accuracy, especially with regards to highlights.