Here's some thought to get things moving here perhaps... I'm convinced the metering in the 10d could be better, or there is a bug. Several times, while shooting a scene, shooting a series of 3 or 4 shots, maybe a couple of seconds apart, I've had one of the images be way underexposed. I check the EXIF info and find it's 2 or 3 stops underexposed from the others with basically the same scene.
Now with partial metering I understand how this can happen, but I'm now using Evaluative mostly for the reason that I want more consistancy when I'm blazing away at a really important time. I thought evaluative broke up the scene into many segments of a grid. If indeed they do, the centre weighting of it would seem a bit extreme. Lately I took 3 photos each about 2 seconds apart. There was a slighty shift in some background elements, but exposure looked like I'd been using partial metering. Even centre-weighted shouldn't have given me 3 stops difference. How can 2 of the shots be so nicely exposed, while one way under? I like evaluative most of the time, but there seems to be some kind of bug in the camera exposure, or else evaluative is more like simple centre-weighted than we've been lead to believe. Isn't there some kind of database of scenes in camera memory that are being compared? Does anyone else wish the shutter button needed to be pushed down a little more to shoot continuous shots? I find myself taking at least 2 most of the time in continuous drive mode, even though I only want one, and I'm feathering the shutter very softly. I mean when I really want to take a burst, I could simply push a bit further. I seems unless you push and release very quickly you'll take more than one. Although taking two of each image has shown me there is something to the fact that the second one will be sharper. It's sometimes true. And slight movement in a bird's head will give you choices in pose. So I'm getting used to shooting bursts now. Perhaps I'm still trying to shake off the old film attitude of cost of bursts, but I also don't want to go home to reviewing hundreds of shot to cull out 2 or 3. I'm going to try manually setting my exposures and see how it goes. It's one thing I'd rather not think about any more than tweaking the compensation wheel, but perhaps I should be more aware of just what shutter speed the camera is using for each shot. I tend to use Av mode, perhaps that is my problem. It might be interesting to see if the camera meter reading in Manual mode using eval metering varies much in this type of scene, and meanwhile I can keep my shots consistant due to the fact that the aperture and s.s. are not changing in Manual mode. The problem comes from this: sunlight is not varying much, it is consistant. But areas of the scene shooting with a long lens (100-400 at the long end being 640mm for me) vary signifigantly. I do need consistant metering while using compensation based on experience. (white bird go down one stop, light grey, half stop down) If I use Manual mode, I can only tell how much proper exposure has changed by the metering scale, I must change exposure now manually, plus add my compensation. But I might be aware of metering inconsistancies more, but lose part of my other priorities for shooting. Or I could use partial metering and try and find a medium grey value in the scene and set Manual with comp to that. What do you guys do? :-) Jim Davis Nature Photography http://www.kjsl.com/~jbdavis/ * **** ******* *********************************************************** * For list instructions, including unsubscribe, see: * http://www.a1.nl/phomepag/markerink/eos_list.htm ***********************************************************
