Mix up your Metering

So my musing today is how you can use your cameras metering system to get totally different looks to your photographs, even of the same subject in the same lighting conditions, at the same time.

First a little explanation on what metering is. Most modern day cameras will have a built in light or exposure meter, this is the part of the camera technology that reads how bright/dark a scene is and adjusts the settings to get a correct (whatever that is!) exposure. So as you lift your camera to your eye and half press the shutter the camera meter quickly reads the scene and thinks to itself “OK, dim day, some dark shadows down there, some mid tones in the centre left, bit brighter in the top left corner” it then sends the signal to the bit of the camera that controls the settings to say “right you need to take this at a shutter speed of 120th of a second at an aperture of F5.6 with an ISO setting of 400″. If you are a more advanced photographer and use the shutter/aperture priority modes then the meter will adjust the settings you have not selected yourself to make sure you still get a “correct” exposure. If you shoot manual then basically you are bypassing the meter and giving your instructions directly to the settings department.

There are three types of metering you can select. One is “Matrix” or “Evaluative” which means the meter looks at the whole scene in the viewfinder and works out the exposure to get as much as the scene correctly exposed, so maybe think of this as being useful for landscapes. Sometimes though the Dynamic Range (the range of tones between very dark and very bright) of the scene is greater than the ability of the cameras sensor to record those very dark and very bright parts at the same time, It’s a bit like when you shield your eyes against the sun to see something because your eyes can’t take in the bright sun and the thing you are trying to view at the same time. In this case one of the other metering modes you can select is called “Centre Weighted”, this is where you say to the meter “ignore (or put less emphasis on) the periphery of the frame and meter so you get the central portion/or the area under the focus point I have chosen, correct”. This is good for say portraits where you want the person to be correctly exposed at the expense of other parts of the scene which you may decide can be brighter or darker to compensate for the person being exposed the way you want. The last mode you can select is “Spot Metering”. This metering mode covers only a very small portion of the frame/scene and is useful for when you want to get very precise results for just that part of the frame, so let’s say you were doing product photography and you wanted to photograph a close up of a Rolex watch logo on a mans wrist who is wearing a white shirt and black jacket. You would spot meter on the logo to give the instruction to the camera to ignore the rest of the watch, shirt cuff and jacket, just make sure you get this bit as good as you can.

So now hopefully you know a bit more about metering let’s look how you can use that to get different images in your photography. In the following wedding photography examples all these images were taken within a minute of each other. As the couple were back lit (i.e the bright sky was behind them) and they were under the shade of a tree, I knew the Dynamic Range of the scene would be too great for my camera so I made the decision to first meter on their faces as this is the part I wanted to get “correctly” exposed. I really like these first images as they have a lovely romantic soft light/contrast to them, this style of photography is called “Contre Jour” which is French for “against the day” or “against the light”. You’ll notice on these that the sky and clouds behind them are completely blown out (so bright you can’t see any detail) some old time photographers would say this is a mistake but to me the parts that are blown out are not really that important.

The silhouettes are where I have spot metered on the clouds behind them knowing that to get those “correctly” exposed the camera would render the couple as dark silhouettes where there is a total lack of detail and you can just see the outline of their shape.

So notice on these two examples that when I spot metered on their faces they were exposed “correctly” and then when I spot metered on the clouds the sky was exposed “correctly”. Two very different styles of photograph taken within a few seconds of each other.