"Metering" Question

Can someone explain the "metering" function on the Nikon D80? I shoot high

school sports (baseball, softball and football) but don't know if I should set

the metering to matrix, centerweighted, or spot. Can someone explain its use

and which one is preferred? The softball and baseball photos are usually shot

in the afternoon/early evening and the football is usually shot in the evening

under poor stadium lights. Thanks.

Laura, with all sports, you really want to use manual exposure mode. The reason is that

things move to fast - one second most of the frame is taken up by a mostly white uniform

in the sun and the next, half the frame has the stands and crowd in it. No camera's

meter, no matter how good it is, can make the adjustments quickly enough to

compensate.

 

Get to your game in time for warm-ups and shoot some test exposures using matrix

metering. Check the exposure on the screen and look at your histograms. Once you have

a good exposure setting, lock it in on manual.

 

Now, if you're shooting indoors, you don't have to worry about changing conditions. If

you're shooting outdoors, be aware if it gets cloudy or sunny and adjust accordingly. Post

some shots and let's see how you do.<div></div>

Laura - I use center wieghted. You are usually trying to capture image of a particular player who may be in shadow or well illuminated. By using a smaller area which the camera will base its metering on your 'subject' will likely be better exposed. Using 'spot' metering, it is difficult to get that spot on the mid toned area of a subject since they are presumably moving quicly and erratically.

Matrix metering may be fine to get a reading and then to set f stop and shutter speed manually. I, myself, would just leave my center weighted setting on, shoot and set for manual exposure.

As Dan mentioned, inside gyms, the light is non-changing - intensity wise, atleast. But outside you need to pay attention if lighting changes from bright sun to cloudy or partly cloudy, and you camera is set for manual exposure. Outside I often use, during the day, 1/500 and f2.8 or 3.2. 3.5. Blurred backgrounds, from wide open aperture, are nice and hard for the snapshooter to get! Set ISO to get good exposure.

Hope this helps a bit.

Thanks. I had noticed that the faces of the players wearing black jerseys seemed to be washed out, but those wearing white looked fine. I guess that would explain it. I'll play around with it and try to learn how to make adjustments. I'm a novice and have great difficulty with lighting (especially shooting afternoon/evening baseball--double-headers that run into the evening). If I set the ISO to 1600, it's too noisy and I may as well dump everything; if I set it to 800, the sharpness is gone and it begins to blur as the light fades. If I try to compensate, in order to capture the picture without the blur, it becomes too dark. I'm frustrated. Thanks for your input.

Hi Laura,

 

Don't be scared by 1600 ISO on the D80 - I have that camera too. Trust me, it's better to have a noisy image at 1600 that captured the shot and froze the action than to have, like you said, an 800 ISO image that has too much motion blur.

 

Plus, you should check out Neat Image or Noise Ninja - these programs to a very good job of eliminating noise from your image without sacrificing a lot of sharpness. I use Noise Ninja, but either will give you great results:

 

><img src="http://csptexas.smugmug.com/photos/258219648_ApggM-L.jpg"

Sorry about the above photo - it was at 800 ISO. :-) Regardless, the D80 takes very acceptable pictures at 1600 ISO if you expose the image properly in camera and then further refine it with a noise reduction program like Noise Ninja or Neat Image.

I am a Canon user, so the options are similar and I have always been confused by those 'metering' options.

 

Am I understanding that you set your expsure while using the center weighted option as you mentioned Steve? Are you setting them in AP or Tv mode then depending on the outcome, you use those settings for your manual shots?

 

Do these metering options have no meaning when shooting in full manual? Do they only come into play when shooting in AP or TV mode?

Please clarify for this newbie;o)

 

Mary