More On Metering

Another Facebook question on metering prompted this reply from me:

Metering is one of the most misunderstood functions of modern-day DSLRs and mirrorless cameras. You can do entire weekend workshops on metering so a quick answer on Facebook isn’t going to cover the ground.

There are three main types of meters: reflective (as found in your camera and reads reflected light coming from the object); incident (one of those funny dome things where the meter reads the light falling on the dome and ignores the light reflected from objects); and the spot meter (which reads a selected spot of the light reflected from an object). In the old days (which I fondly remember) cameras came with no meter or a rudimentary center-weighted meter. Worked pretty well until you started to shoot a black cat standing in front of a white wall in sunlight. Same for a white cat standing in front of a black wall in sunlight.

And thus came the spot meter (very expensive back then). Worked great especially if the photographer understood Ansel Adams’ (look him up) Zone System (look that up too). So as cameras progressed we got all sorts of dumb but cleverly worded marketing of “matrix meters” which were supposed to figure out complex metering using modern digital cameras where the sensors hugely preferred not to have the highlights blown out as they weren’t recoverable in post.

So go to YouTube where all things photography exist on video and do some research. It’s quite an education. And as for now shooting ordinary stuff just use the standard metering in the camera and look up exposure compensation and use it to make minor modifications to the lightness or darkness of your image.

For birds with an OM-1 and 300 f/4 go to shutter speed mode (I’m assuming here you’ve read your manual – essential – with camera in hand and paid particular attention to the exposure triangle and shooting modes) at 1/2500th of a second and aperture wide open or maybe 5.6 (slightly sharper renditions) and ISO on auto with exposure compensation +7 for birds in flight against a bright sky. You’re going to want to process your raw files (not JPGs) in a raw editor like Lightroom. If you’re not using Lightroom and its excellent noise reduction feature DXO Pure RAW is essential.