"Nelson Ricciardi" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote/replied to: > >"Plus if darker than a mid-tone, and minus if lighter." > >Isn�t it the other way around????
Yes, sir it is. Think about metering white. Your meter wants to make it grey by exposing less. You have to increase exposure. Open up, let more light in, make that thing white. On slide film, you want to bracket, cause a little too much light's going to burn out that white's detail. You decide how much detail you want. With some experience you can get what you want in most situations. There's always different situations coming up though where you have to bracket and hope. Next roll you shoot, do a test of a spot metering on a really white area with some faint detail. Shoot at spot metered reading, then bracket up by half stops more exposure to 3 stops over. You decide on what that film can handle and what detail you retained at what over exposure. Methinks 2-3 stops for colour slide film. Now by swinging that metering circle into the shadows, you can calculate where you will lose detail there, and where you have to expose to get the detail you want there, in the dark areas. Then likely you find out you can't get details in both and decide what compromise to expose, or bracket. Or flash fill :-) I have a spot meter of 1 degrees, but prefer not to carry it around unless I'm doing something where I really need to get my readings from a distance, when lighting is changing, and when I'm on a tripod most likely, so I can keep the meter in my hands. Otherwise, I use partial metering in my EOS55 as a spot meter. Works great. Yesterday in fact I shot some backlit sunset photos of ducks on a pond. Most of my scene was almost black, with strong reflections on the water around the ducks from the sunset. Partial metering in this situation would underexpose most of the scene, there being too much light in the middle. I wanted to get some detail in the backlit ducks too. I set for +2 EC, which was a low as I dared go on the shutter, it was getting quite dark. Otherwise, I'd have had to go to Manual mode to get more exposure. I also shot some at +1. I wanted the scene to be black with mere duck silhouttes (sp?) in some scenes. But then, this was one of those difficult metering jobs, even with a 1 degree spot. I knew I'd never retain good details in the severe highlights, but some detail in the immediate shadow areas would be nice. Different exposures in these cases can produce very different looking images. A good time to have negative film in the camera, which I did. I was using centre weighted metering for a day to see how it worked. I was trying to decide on what metering was best for general walk around shooting. What to use as a default camera setting. It worked well except in one scene where I had a bright centre, and much darker all around. It underexposed in this scene, but average metering would have likely been fine. Or partial metering both light and dark and compensating. It wasn't a problem as it was just a shot of my front hall :-) So average metering is my default, it seems to work well, except in really obvious problem lighting. * **** ******* *********************************************************** * For list instructions, including unsubscribe, see: * http://www.a1.nl/phomepag/markerink/eos_list.htm ***********************************************************
