Metering

A big thanks to Martin for covering for me yesterday, It was a very busy day for me and i have to say the week has flown by again without the cameras coming out, I did take them out yesterday as i went to the new house and have to pass Falls Lake which is a huge lake not far from the house, The Autumn colours are starting to come out here which is about 3 weeks earlier than the norm and i hoped to stop and grab some shots around the lake, However the lake edge is not yet showing signs of colour so i did not waste my time,
One thing that i am not sure that's been covered here is metering, Its extremely important as its whats determines your exposure but its something not many people talk about, I used to pretty much leave my camera in matrix or evaluative metering where the camera takes readings across the whole scene, Its works great most of the time and i would recommend it for anybody but its not fool proof, Get some heavy back-lighting and the meter will be fooled and you may want to gain some better control over what you are doing and the result that you want, Much of the time now i used spot metering, As you progress and gain knowledge you start to understand different tones and what they will do if you meter off of them, For instance when i was in Japan and pretty much everywhere has snow it was easy to have the camera in spot and then point the camera at the snow and adjust the meter until it was at 2 stops above zero, Thats way we had a pretty much perfect histogram and as long as the light stayed the same all the images came out great, By doing this using manual mode it also makes batch processing images easy an quick, Partial metering is very similar to spot but is not quite so accurate in the fact that the area it reads is slightly bigger and i know of a couple of pros that actually prefer this over spot, The only time that i use center weighted is when i am shooting manatees under water, It does what it says and takes a reading from the center part of the image, When i am shooting manatees i know that the animal will be filling alot of the image especially the center and as they are a mid tone using centre weighted metering will give a good result, I normally set the camera at -1/3 just to make sure that any highlights are kept under control
So there you have it-metering in a nut shell,Every camera is slightly different, In the old days i used to set my Canon EOS 1v and 3 to minus -1/3 as on zero it was slightly bright and in the those days of slide what you took was what you got,
On a personal note the house has now had its inspection and survey and we have a meeting with the builder this week, apart from that its a waiting game until the 27th when we will move in, I met the neighbors who are animal lovers and said that they regularly see deer and fox in our garden along with the odd raccoon, As soon as the meeting with the builder is done i will start putting some food out for the birds and animals so that they will be ready for when we move in

Dave