Gossen, a name that made history. It’s up there, along other names of various photographic machines and accessories made in a time when things were produced to last (almost) forever. The Gossen light meter is one of the most ubiquitous such photographic implements that one may find on the market.
This meter here is called Gossen Sixon, also known as Gossen Color Finder. They loved the “Six” prefix, as Gossen had at least 5 or 6 light meters with this word in their names. How this contraption is able to “find colour” is beyond me, although I have read whatever literature is there to be found on the subject. Of course it is not finding the colour, it’s just attempting to measure the light temperature by metering the entire scene and correcting the colour to balance to daylight. To be honest, my interest in this item is purely that of measuring the light, in the classic manner of a light meter, coloured light or not.
One selects the ASA/DIN of the film used, by turning the selector knob as per need. Then, observing a EV scale from 1 to 12 (changing in sequential order by turning again the knob, and seen in a small window at the end of shutter and aperture rolling scale), Point the meter towards the scene and as per indications of a needle, one chooses the right value (1-12) and read the shutter speed and aperture desired. Not very easy to do in the field, and clearly a bit more complicated than a regular, classic matching needle light meter.
The corrugated rolling cover is always a wonder to me, for it resembles the window rollers of a house I was staying in in the south of Italy in the early 90’s. Every time I look at this meter I remember those times 🙂 . Of course, the roller cover here is having the role of covering the light cell (selenium) to discern between incident and reflective types of measuring the light. I find this to be very imaginative, as manners of measuring the light go.
On the back of the meter, a chart shows how to employ the use of colour filters for your colour photography.
