I wanted to touch base with all my Snapshop Grads and do just a little review about metering...

I think that metering sometimes gets overwhelming because you must be thinking about not just measuring the light, but then trying to determine HOW you're going to get enough or get rid of, that light by using your aperture, shutterspeed and/or ISO.

Let's review just a bit...back to some foundational
things...

First of all, remember that your camera is a LIGHT SENSOR...it doesn't "see" pictures, people, trees, dogs, landscapes, etc...it doesn't "SEE" anything...it just measures the light...

it measures the highlights, the shadows...it measures in what we call a "histogram" (Snapshop #2 will go into that a little bit more)

When you are telling your camera to measure light, you have to tell it WHERE you want to measure it...

Matrix metering mode (for Nikon), or evaluative metering (for Canon) considers the largest portion of the scene when metering the light.

The camera’s sensor considers all available light in any given situation and comes up with the best suggested exposure. When you don't have too many contrasting images, and you have nice even light, this works well...especially when you want to capture an entire landscape or the "setting" is really important in your image as well.

Center-weighted or Partial mode is a little bit like matrix metering.  In this case though, is sort of disregards the WHOLE picture and "senses" in on the middle or the center of the frame.  It measures the light in a little area around the middle and "reports back" to you what kind of light you have so that that area is exposed correctly (it may mean the the outside edges will be too light or too dark depending on what you are shooting).

Spot Metering is exactly that...your camera sends out it's "tractor beams" of light to that specific spot in the frame and just ignores everything else!  This type of metering tends to give you the most control when you are taking photographs of specific people and want THEM exposed correctly.  However, be mindful that if you are spot metering on a face and the person is wearing a contrasting color, the shirt or dress may be blown out or a dark blob...in these cases, you'll need to practice upon which area of the image you want to meter the light. (see below)

Here we have a beautiful little Princess Palace Pet to help us demonstrate the "light measuring"...

I put her on the window sill so that we would have that contrast of light on one side and dark on the other...(just because I like a challenge) I metered out to "0" just to be fair and put it in the "exact" exposure according to my camera. I kept my aperture at 2. 2 for all of them and ISO at 200..I just adjusted my shutterspeed for this tutorial.

With the Matrix metering, the camera took into consideration EVERYTHING...therefore it came up with an "average" and told me that I needed to adjust my settings accordingly...it metered out when I hit 1/2000 of a second with my shutterspeed. Notice that little Beauty looks a little underexposed.  She's darker on one side than the other and sort of fades into the dark on the right side of the image.


Center weighted got a little bit better.  I measured the light on Beauty's face...by doing this, my camera is measuring the light there, but also in a partial circle around beauty...so notice that it recognized that I needed more light in order to brighten up Beauty's right side of the face, along with her tail.  However, the window gets a lot brighter as well, because the camera is ignoring that portion of the LCD screen.


Spot metering gets Beauty perfectly.  I tried to meter on the left eye towards the middle of her head.  If I would have metered on her tail or the right eye, the camera would have measured not enough light and in my changing of settings, the left side of her face would have been blown out. Therefore, with spot metering it takes some practice to determine where to tell the camera to measure the light.

Notice with spot that EVERYTHING got brighter because the camera was ONLY CONSIDERING the light ON THE SPOT on Beauty's face...nowhere else...In this case, I metered out at 1/800 of a second...more than half of what matrix metering told me to do.

While this works well in this situation, I have to be careful when spot metering in high contrasting situations...for example, in the snow, I can spot meter on my child's face in her dark gloves & scarf...however, when I meter out, the snow will have no detail whatsoever, because it will have blown out completely...again, it will depend on the "story" you want to tell, and what you deem most important in your photograph.



Hope that helps a little with regards to working in Manual mode and metering your available light.