Exposure Metering - How to predict compensation

[zafar1]

I am afraid that with digital cameras have spoiled me. I use camera's metering system, take a picture, look at

the histogram, correct the exposure, take the picture and repeat the cycle until I am satisfied.

 

I don't think this is a very good way of taking the picture and I would like to be able to quickly adjust the

exposure and get it right the first time. I understand all about metering modes, and that dark objects and white

objects cause over-under exposure. However I can't seem to get an exact handle on how much compensation to apply

to nail the exposure.

 

Can other people discuss their technique to nail the exposure.

[bobatkins]

Spot meter on something you want to appear as a mid-tone and use no EC....or....spot meter on something you want to be a highlight and dial in around +2.5 EC

[zafar1]

Bob

 

By "highlight" you mean the subject?

 

Also canon camera's have only +/-2.0 EC. Can this be changed?

[SCL]

Think the Zone System.

[richterjw]

You can do the EC manually by Shutter or Aperture Priority mode or full Manual mode.

[www.philwinterphotography.]

As long as the light is reasonably constant, use manual mode. Use "Sunny 16" or meter off something of known (or presumed) reflectance. Take a shot, check the histogram, and adjust as necessary. Then shoot away. With a little practice, you will gain enough confidence to shoot without worrying about the camera's meter or constantly chimping. I like to find the brightest white I can find, like a white wall or something, and set my exposure to 2 stops over on that. Then everything else falls into place.

 

If nothing else, M mode will produce consistent exposures, where AV, TV, and P modes are constantly changing exposures to what the camera thinks is "right."

[bobatkins]

By highlight I mean area in the image you want to be the brightest without washing out. Something white for example.

 

It's your basic"Zone System" exposure metering as mentioned above

[cliff_henry]

Bob wrote: "Spot meter on something you want to appear as a mid-tone and use no EC...."

 

I would add - spot meter on something in the same light as main subject you want to appear as a mid-tone and use no EC.

 

With practice, which is a lot easier with digital that it was with film, you can learn to recognize a mid-tone (18%). If there is no mid-tone available to meter on then the trick is to recognize how many stops the item you meter is over or under mid-tone. Once you can do that then you will know how much EC to apply to exposure.

 

By using spot metering you only have to find one area to meter on. If that area is not 18% mid-tone, then use EC to make it so and lock exposure, recompose and shoot. All other areas in the scene will fall into place. Additionally, after spot metering a mid-tone you can use EC to make the overall exposure of the scene to your likiing, e.g., overexposed or underexposed.

 

An example would be a landscape that has bright sun light and mixed dark shadows. You could meter on green grass or tree bark - both reflect 18% - to give your scene an average mid-tone exposure.

 

I hope this helps.

 

Cliff

[PuppyDigs]

You can also learn to apply EC by observing your histogram, note the scene/subject reflectance and next time you

encounter a similar situation, apply the same amount of EC without looking at the histogram. I learned to do this with slides

decades ago and still do it every time I shoot. With digital the learning curve is really short. Realistically, most of the time

you just have to know or the image is gone by the time you chimp 'n monkey with the knobs...

[correct_exposure]

http://www.spotmetering.com/

[picturesque]

If I don't have time to meter, I add exposure comp based on past experience and on testing. Basically you shoot images in various lighting situations and remember what kind of compensation was needed to make the images correctly exposed. Then the next time you run across a similar situation, do the same thing, like Puppy Face said, above.

 

For ambient metering, I use center weighted metering mode because I am used to it and it is logically simpler for me (could be different for you). It is hard to explain, but in a way, you 'become the meter'. If you know that a center weighted meter pays attention to what is basically in the middle of the frame, and if you know that a meter bases it's exposure recommendation upon middle gray, you can quickly compare the scene in front of you (what is under that center area) to middle gray and see what compensation might be needed. It helps if you defocus your eyes and let everything (again, what is under that center area) kind of run together so you 'see' one basic value. It also helps to observe what your particular meter tends to do in different lighting situations and whether it tends to overcompensate for lights than darks, etc. Sounds like voodoo, but I feel it works well, although nailing exposure exactly every single time is probably an impossibility.

[andy_witkowski]

Wouldn't it be nice to have a live histogram overlay in the viewfinder? (of course something that you can turn on and off)

[alan_myers]

I have two quick suggestions:

 

1. Buy and use a hand held incidence meter.

 

2. Buy and read the book "Understanding Exposure".

[sarah_fox]

Honestly, it's pretty fast just to expose per the histogram if you remember that it's graduated in stops.

[pbizarro]

That was the advantage of learning exposure with slide film. Pretty quickly I learned what I was doing wrong. That, and a lot of practice and experience. Basically, your "lazy" approach has indeed spoiled you, so change it for something more inteligent and robust. Rather than "dumb" trial and error.

[sarah_fox]

Wow, I'm not often called dumb and lazy!

 

Paul, only the very arrogant photographer claims to nail the exposure every time, at least without a lot of spot metering and planning. The realists among us either bracket exposures or tweak them manually. If I were dumb or lazy, I'd just let the AE do it's job and not worry about it. More industrious than that, I'd do some spot metering and draw from Adams' zone method, or at the very least do an incident reading and estimate how to ETTR based on the reflectances or transmittances I see in the scene.

 

However, in my experience, in the instant digital age, where a histogram is only a few seconds away, the dumb and lazy trial and error approach yields the very best results of all and gets me to the best settings the quickest. With this dumb and lazy method, I do manage to nail the exposure, and I can probably do it twice as fast as any industrious photographer who is proficient with a spot meter. (I know, becaue I'm also proficient with a spot meter.) The only drawback is that the method doesn't come with boasting rights, and one must sometimes suffer the indignity of being called dumb and lazy.

[songtsen]

Zafar Kazmi , Jul 08, 2008; 05:34 p.m.:

'I am afraid that with digital cameras have spoiled me...'

 

Paulo Bizarro , Jul 09, 2008; 10:19 p.m.:

'Basically, your "lazy" approach has indeed spoiled you...'

[john_g10]

"get it right the first time" ....

 

If you have time you have to meter lots of area in the scene otherwise I'm afraid you have to chimp.

[picturesque]

Sarah--I don't think Paul was referring to your post, but to Zafar's. In any case, let's not turn this into a chest beating discussion.

 

There seem to be two schools of thought here. School One says meter, in whatever form. School Two says try it out (several different ways suggested) and tweak if necessary. Of the latter, some claim to be faster than others, for whatever reason. I do think everyone can agree that you aren't going to nail exposure perfectly every time, no matter what you do, and that a better understanding of exposure in general and how your camera meters can only help. So try out all the ways suggested and see what works for you.

[zafar1]

Thanks to all for the answers. This is very helpful. I have tried Sunny/16 for outside and it seems to work very well (within 1/3 of stop). Other spot metering suggestions are also very helpful and will definitely help me improve the exposure.

[dana_swanson]

Hi Everyone,

 

I was curious if there's a possible way to train yourself to determine gray levels without a camera. Maybe a lesson from a book or magazine. I can't see how it could be done but I figured I would ask the question. I've been trying it out and it's a nice feeling when you get it right.

 

How about a web site with spot meter photo of the day. A web site to visit on your lunch break. The page could show a photo and ask where you would meter for 18% gray, nothing fancy and give you a spot meter icon to find the locations to choose from. It could also ask you to type in the gray levels of various areas highlighted in the photo as a quiz. Just an idea if anyone wanted to go with it. :)

 

See ya,

 

Dana

[sarah_fox]

Point taken, Songtsen and Nadine. Sorry, Paulo. :-/

 

Dana, With experience, many photogs sort of know what to expect from a scene and where to start, give or take a stop or two. In fact I know one photographer who couldn't afford a meter when she was young. I'm sure it would have been a great surprise to her fine art profs that she was actually eyeballing her exposure. Along about the same time, I had upgraded from my first meter, which I had bought with my first SLR, to my trusty Gossen Luna Pro, which I own and use to this day. While my contemporaries were all gaga about the AE capabilities of their favorite camera, the Canon AE-1, I was a manual shooter with my Spotmatic F and relied mostly on incident readings.

 

I only bring this up because we all had different styles of exposing that all worked. The first photographer had more of a bracketing approach, combined with an exceptionally good eye. I've seen and digitized some of her negatives. The exposures generally weren't dead-on, but neither were they all that far off. Most of her work has been oil painting, but a few examples of her photographic work are here: http://www.graphic-fusion.com/galleryewt.htm. (I'm trying to encourage her to pick up a camera again (decades later), in this digital age.)

 

At the other extreme, with the state of the art of sophistication, the AE-1 photographers of the day had the advantage of being able to meter on the fly, without worrying too much about it. They could grab a lot of shots while I was still fiddling with my light meter. Their approach was hands-down superior to mine for anything that moved, jumped, or was otherwise fleeting. (Of course that would apply to a lot of things in a teenager's world.)

 

On the other hand, my incident readings worked very well for me. I didn't have the same concerns as the AE-1 photogs about variation in darkness of the subjects and backgrounds. The light was what it was. The incident reading allowed me to calibrate to the environment, and my eye told me whether to bump the exposure a bit higher or lower.

 

My current approach is quite similar. I do use AE, but only to get me to a starting point. I'll shoot one or two test shots to assess the scene, figure out how I need to tweak, and then go to manual if I'll be taking many more shots. The only thing that will keep me in Av mode is erratic lighting conditions, such as with clouds drifting in and out overhead.

 

My dream camera still hasn't been designed or manufactured. It would have a built in incident dome and a button to preset the exposure settings in manual mode -- probably with f/8 designated as my starting aperture, combined with whatever speed the meter determined. I would then tweak and jog from there -- not only speed and aperture, but also ISO -- on three parallel wheels.

 

But I agree that there is no single method that is best for everyone. I think with experience we all fall into what works best for us. My only point, originally, which I failed to convey effectively, was that the trial and error approach is a very legitimate approach, and in fact it's used by some of the most compulsive and exacting photographers. The OP shouldn't feel unsophisticated for using it. His desire was to nail the exposure the first time, and my point was that it's OK to nail the exposure the 2nd or 3rd time, so long as he nails it. However, if his approach isn't working for him, he is right to seek a different approach.

[picturesque]

I thought Zafar was talking about determining exposure comp without metering. When I meter, I use a hand held incident meter, even shooting weddings. However, when I rely on the camera's meter when I am using aperture or shutter priority, I do as I described above. I don't spot meter, because that would be as slow as metering otherwise.

 

Here is a chart for you, Dana. It is from the book, "The Hasselblad Manual" by Ernst Wildi. The 0 column are all color values that are equivalent to middle gray. The top numbers are stops plus or minus, and the bottom numbers correspond to the Zone System. The numbers refer to vertical columns, not horizontal rows. You could print it out and carry a card sized version with you to help you visualize middle gray 'hiding' in colored items. In fact, I recall seeing such a chart somewhere online, with the same instructions. You can get very good at it--to within 1/2 stop. You also see where skin tone might fall--between one and one and a half stop over middle gray.

 

No one has mentioned using skin (faces) or the palm of your hand. That's an old trick. The palm of your hand stays relatively the same in value (regardless of how much you tan), so if you establish the value of your palm in relation to middle gray, you have an instant standard reference which is always with you. The only problem would be always getting your palm in the same light as your subjects.<div></div>

[picturesque]

Oops...sorry to be politically incorrect. 1 to 1 1/2 stops over middle gray for skin tone is for Caucasian skin. Of course there are many other kinds of skin tone, although again, the palm skin tone is less wide, usually.

[picturesque]

Here is an illustration of my original post. The original image is shown, and the second image shows what happens if you defocus your eyes and pay attention to the value that begins to emerge. The oval is approximately what an averaging meter's sensitivity area is. I would guess that the value is like a plus one stop compensation, maybe slightly more. So if I were pressed for time and couldn't meter, I might set my camera to aperture or shutter priority but dial in a one stop comp. It would probably get me close.<div></div>