Metering modes

Chunkey Monkey

Chunkey Monkey

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Mark
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Can someone enlighten me as to what circumstances you would use the following metering modes


Evalutive


partial


centre weighted


spot
 
It's a personal choice, some people favour a certain mode, some switch about at will.

Metering basics:

Your meter will give you correct results shooting 18% grey, because our photo's often contain a lot of sky (brighter than the subject) camera makers gave us centre weighted metering as soon as they could get the electronics sorted (this prioritises the centre of the frame and prevents the bright sky from dominating the meter.

Partial metering is an even smaller area than centre weighted, it takes in enough of a scene to be an averaging metering mode, but it's small enough to just be metering for your subject.

Spot metering is a very small spot in the centre of the viewfinder so you can meter from a single object in the frame. Some people find it really useful, but IMO it's only useful if you have an 18% area to measure, or if you can happily look at an object and say 'that's 1 stop brighter than 18% grey' or 'that's 1 1/2 stop darker than 18% grey'

Which brings us to evaluative or Matrix metering. Here the camera measures the light from many areas across the frame, then it compares them to each other so that if you have a bright spot or dark area, it'll choose to care a little less about those bits and prioritise an average of the more similar values.

All that said, remember it's looking for an average brightness, so a snow scene will be underexposed and a night scene will be overexposed if you leave the meter to just do it's thing.
 
Just to add, unlike what a lot of people think, your meter doesn't 'lie' to you or 'get it wrong'.

You have to remember the question you're asking your meter is; 'what's the correct exposure in these lighting conditions if the subject has an average reflectance?'

Which isn't the same thing as 'what's the correct exposure in these lighting conditions?', which is the answer people are looking for.
 
On my 5D2, I found myself changing between metering modes quite a lot, because the camera had fewer metering zones, in evaluative sometimes bright spots in the frame, but out of focus, would sometimes cause the camera to give an unexpected exposure.

Of course, most of the time you want the subject which is in focus, at the focus point to be exposed "correctly" and everything else can be left to clip if necessary.

I am not sure about your camera, but the 5D3 works much better and evaluative works so much more predictably. I use evaluative with exposure compensation to get the correct exposure for 99% of my shots. I use spot or centre weighted for the rest which would normally be backlit or high contrast conditions.

My advice to would be to try them all to see what they do, how they work and learn to apply them to your photography. For general scenes, I think evaluative with compensation (if needed) is the way to go.

The other skill that comes in handy is the ability to read the histogram. For another thread perhaps, but Google will give you all the info you need.
 
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