<p>Hello all,<br /><br />I've just bought my first ever electronic camera, a Canon T90. Up until now, I've been using a FED 2, Hasselbald 500cm, and a Travelwide. For metering, I've used with a Sekonic handheld meter for incident/reflective or a Pentax 1 degree spot meter as needed.<br /><br />I bought the T90 because I found a 50mm f/1.2 very cheaply and thought I'd try out an electronic automated SLR to see how I like it. There seems to be a hundred different ways of doing everything on this camera, all of which are completely obscured by marketing drivel and poor English in the manual. Coming from mechanical cameras I'm now very confused!<br /><br />I'd like some assistance with the spot metering, please.<br /><br /><br />I understand that you can take multiple spot readings and bias the camera to a particular area by giving more readings in that location. I believe I'm correct in saying the camera will then average those readings out. Then additionally, there are up and down spot metering exposure compensation buttons (which are different from the main exposure compensation settings), that let you increase or reduce exposure to render shadows or highlights as you'd like.<br /><br />I think I understand how exposure compensation works if I meter for just a shadow, or just a highlight, or maybe one shadow and one highlight. However, I don't understand what affect the compensation has if I've metered multiple times, perhaps with a bias.<br /><br /><br />So, some questions:<br /><br />1) If multiple spot readings are taken, how is the averaging done? Does the scale on the right indicate what decision has been made?<br /><br />2) What do the shadow/highlight up/down buttons actually do? Do they just drag the determined exposure up and down by so many stops?<br /><br />3) Do the up/down compensation buttons operate on each reading one at a time, or the overall average? For instance, if I meter 3 times and compensate after each, will this work out differently to just compensating once at the end of taking 3 readings?<br /><br /><br />I think I probably like the metering options on the T90, it's just I'm so used to doing this stuff in my head, I'm having a hard time understanding what the camera is doing for me, and whether I want it to or not!<br /><br /><br />Thanks all.<br /><br /><br />EDIT: There also seems to be three ways to take a meter reading. First, by half-pressing the shutter release. Second, by using the small button next to the shutter release. Third, by using the button under your thumb, next to the up/down buttons.<br /><br />I understand the second method locks multiple spot readings in for automatic averaging. What do the shutter release and thumb button do?</p>
