Basic Photography | When To Use Spot Meter?

There is a reason why camera manufacturer provide us with different set of metering mode, it is to make our job easier in order to get nice exposure, well balance exposure. It was not difficult to change a camera mode in your camera, but some people just don’t know how or when to do it or why they need to change the metering mode.

If you take your time to read the Manual, you will find out that there are many type of metering that your camera offer. Among the standard metering option that was available in your camera is Evaluative Metering, Matrix Metering, Partial Metering, Spot Metering and Center-Weighted Average Metering. I believe whatever DSLR brand that you are using have this option, maybe the name is a little bit different but the function is almost the same.

I don’t want to discuss in depth about each metering mode, but I will give you just a basic idea how the metering work. Evaluative Metering for Canon or Matrix Metering for Nikon user will take average reading for the whole scene in the frame and they will use their own system to calculated what is the best exposure for that particular scene, both camera use different method in determining the exposure, some are better than the other but they are not perfect, otherwise why do we have other metering option.

The problem using Evaluative Metering or Matrix Metering is that, they don’t know which part of the picture that is more important than the other and for tricky lighting condition like the picture above, where the large part of the scene is in dark area and the camera will assume that there is not much light in the scene, so the camera metering will give extra exposure and the resulting image if we choose to use matrix Metering or Evaluative Metering is that the picture will become too bright and maybe, I said “maybe” because I do’t use that metering, maybe the face of my son will get burn out and loss some details.

In this scene, the most important part is my son face, I really don’t care if the shirt that my wife wore get burn out or get underexposed, what matters here is my son face get a proper exposure.

Metering Mode | Source : Nikon

So before you decide to choose which type of metering that is suitable for the subject that you shoot, you need to understand why you have to use one particular metering mode over the other. If you understand how each of your metering mode work, whenever you arrive at your chosen destination and base on lighting condition and the subject that you want to shoot, you will know for sure what type of metering mode that is more suitable over the other. Yes you can “Guess” or try different option by keeps on changing the exposure or the metering mode but if you don’t understand how the metering work you will never learn anything, you must know what you are doing and not just trying or experimenting.

For your family picture, maybe you can experimenting, if it doesn’t right, you can change the metering mode to get it right but what happen if you shoot for your client or shooting paid function or event, you can’t experiment with that, the moment happen very fast and you need to know exactly what type of metering mode that is suitable for the environment where the function or event take place.

So when to use Spot Meter? My answer is, when there is a tricky lighting condition, when there is huge contrast between bright area and dark area, when there is huge contrast between your subject and the environment or background. As an example if you take a a full body picture of someone wearing a white T-Shirt against a black door or dark wooden door where the large area of the picture is the door and the subject is only tiny part of the door yet the subject is more important that the door.

In this situation if you choose Matrix Metering or Evaluative Metering Mode, the camera will think that the large area of the scene is dark, the camera didn’t know that there is a person standing against the door because only you know it, so when the sensor sense that the large area of the scene is dark, the camera will try to compensate this and gives an extra exposure and the end result is the subject or the T-Shirt of the person will get blown or burn out, and if there is a details in the T-Shirt, it will be totally blown out, leaving no details just white color and the door will be brighter than it was supposed to be, so in this case the right metering mode to use is Spot Meter and not Matrix or Evaluative Metering.

So for the photograph of my son above, I use Spot Metering Mode and take the reading on my son face but I did underexposed it a bit because I want to protect the details in the clothes that cover my son. If I get it right for my son face then I worry that the details in the clothes will get blown away, so I choose to underexposed it a bit and fine tune it later in Photoshop and the final result, I cropped it tight to fills the frame with my son.

To end this post, I highly suggest you to read back the Manual that comes with your camera and try to understand how different metering mode work, then only you can choose which metering that is suitable for certain environment or situation because you know “Why” you have to use it instead of just guessing which one is right.

* For the editing method you may check the banner below and you will get the idea how I do my editing…

Basic Photography | When To Use Spot Meter?

Wazari Wazir

Leave a Reply