Personally, I think that all of us who started out in the days before digital photography have an advantage over those starting out with a digital camera. I say that because in the days of film camera, especially if it was before film camera started having programmed shooting modes, every photographer had to learn how to work with aperture settings (f/stops), shutter speeds, ASA settings, light meters, etc. Today’s DSLR (Digital Single Lens Reflects) camera allow the photographer to make all these adjustments themselves but many starting out with a digital camera never progress beyond using the camera’s programmed shooting modes because they really don’t know how to use all these features. Learning how to use these features will make you a more creative photographer. If you don’t use all the features your expensive DSLR has to offer you, you might as well sell it and buy a relatively inexpensive point-and-shoot digital camera because they will produce equally good pictures in their auto-programmed shooting modes.
One of the things that gives you a great deal of creative control over the pictures you take is the camera’s built in light meter and its various metering modes. If you peruse the manual that came with your DSLR, you will find very little information on its metering modes. Take the manual for the Nikon D-40, one of the cameras I shoot with, if you were to gather all the words spent on metering modes together there wouldn’t be enough of them to cover one solid page of instruction. I never really noticed that because I was familiar with metering modes and how to use them. I only came to realize it after my grand daughter came to me with her camera’s manual in hand and asked me to explain metering modes to her. I imagine that many people starting out in photography today are just as confused as she was.
Learning to use the different metering modes on your camera is a skill well worth knowing as it puts in your hands more control in how your camera approaches capturing a particular scene. This brief article will not make you an expert in their use but it will get you started out on the right foot.
Most cameras have three metering modes-a multi-segmented or zonal metering modes; a center weighted metering mode, and a spot-metering mode.
When shooting in one of programmed modes, the camera is using the multi-segmented or zonal system. The camera takes light level readings from zones spread throughout the whole picture area and then averages out those readings to set the camera for the best overall exposure. The Canon EOS 5D, for example, takes readings from 35 different areas and then uses those readings to compute the best overall exposure. As a rule this mode works fine but there are times when the camera guesses wrong at what the best exposure is and you need to know how to take control to get the picture you want.
The center-weighted mode is similar to the zonal metering system in that it takes reading from multiple area of the frame but it differs from the multi-segmented mode in that it places emphasis on the readings from the center of the frame. The center-weighted mode is a good mode to use when shooting in situations where there is a great deal of difference in light level between the center of the frame and the outer edges. This is a good mode to use when shooting from the doorway of a dimly lit interior of a structure with your subject standing in bright sunlight. In this shooting scenario, using center-weighted metering will provide a good compromise between zonal metering and spot metering.
The spot metering mode concentrates taking light level readings from the very center of the frame and ignores the rest of the frame. In spot mode, a dot appears in the viewfinder and the camera will take a reading from whatever you place this dot on. Spot metering is the best mode to use when shooting portraitures of people or pets.
As they say, seeing is believing, so to see just how these three metering modes effect the pictures you shoot, try this experiment. To do this you are going to need a dimly lit building, a bright sunny day, and a friend or two. Have you friend stand in the open doorway or a few feet outside it so they are in the bright sunlight. Now place them in the center of the frame and shoot them using all three metering modes. As you can see the center-weighted mode truly is a compromise between the zone metered exposure and the spot metered exposure.
The best way to master metering modes are to experiment with them to find out which works best in what situation. One of the hardest things that us old timers had to learn when we switched to digital was that we could experiment all we wanted because shooting one hundred pictures didn’t cost us anymore than shooting one picture. Well, at least it doesn’t if you’re using rechargeable batteries in your camera and flash unit.
