Night and Low-light Photography Photo Workshop

    ■   Matrix or evaluative metering. This is the

mode that camera manufacturers try to

improve all the time because it looks at the

whole scene and tries to actually determine

what you are photographing. This mode

divides the entire scene into different seg-

ments and then tries to determine what the

proper exposure is for the scene. It is an excel-

lent choice for scenes that don’t have big

areas of extreme brightness or darkness, like

that in Figure 2-5.

low-light photography is anything but average.
Many of the photo subjects covered in this book
are difficult to meter, but you need to know what
the different metering modes do.

Metering modes

The camera has a built-in light meter that reads
the light reflected off the subjects in front of the
lens, but it doesn’t treat the whole scene equally.
Digital cameras have at least three different
metering modes and, depending on which one
you use, the outcome can be very different. Each
mode looks at the scene in front of the camera in
a different way.

■   Spot metering. In this mode, the camera’s

built-in light meter only looks at a small area
of the overall scene, usually the area in the
center of the frame. It ignores everything else
and is really useful for when you have very
large areas of light or dark that you don’t want
to be part of the exposure equation. On many
new cameras, the spot metering area is tied to
the focus point (the autofocus point on which
the camera uses to focus). This allows you to
use the spot metering on the subject, even
when it isn’t in the middle of the frame.

■   Center-weighted metering. Center-weighted

metering looks at the scene and pays more
attention to the area in the middle of the
scene than it does to the edges; in most of the
cameras produced today, you can set the size
of the area to be measured. This is really use-
ful when you’re taking portraits and you want
to make sure the camera’s built-in light meter
measures the light falling on the subject,
rather than the background.

ABOUT THIS PHOTO Photographing my dog outside in the

shade allowed for the matrix metering to work well because there

were no large areas that were very bright or very dark. Taken at 1/1000

second, f/4, and ISO 200.

2-5