Best metering?

[trvl_girl]

Probably a silly question, but if I'm taking pictures outside of someone posing for me, which is the best way to have my metering set up? Spot, partial, ect???? I'm trying to learn the whole % of grey areas with the different metering, but just wanted to ask your opinions and please tell me why.

Thank you

[RLucas]

I would use spot, and meter off the face. If you adjust your exposure to where the face reads 0 on your meter, it will expose your subject correctly. Try to fill your frame with as much of your subject you can. This way, your background either being badly over/under exposed will be less of a distraction.

[Jim Bryant]

Spot.....for sports and portraits.
Overall or partial for landscapes.

[kencaleno]

We all want “Perfect Exposure”, but how do we achieve this ?

What is “Perfect Exposure?” - Perfect exposure occurs when the lighting of the subject, balances with the Dynamic Range of the camera’s sensor, (Usually 5 EV stops). In other words, there should be detail in highlight areas of a scene, without blown highlights, and detail in shadow areas without clipping.

First of all, let’s take a look at our cameras’ metering methods, just to clear up some
confusion:

The scene is a person, standing on the beach, with a brightly-lit background -

a) Matrix,

(sometimes called evaluative, or multi-segment, depending on make of camera) would take an overall look at the scene and divide it into many segments, take into consideration the distance of the subject, and the lens’s focal length setting. All this data is fed into the meter’s processing unit, in order to determine the best possible exposure. This mode of metering would give the best rendition of the scene, as it would tend to favour the subject, (person)
and modulate the background to suit.

b) Centre-Weighted,

would measure the scene and concentrate on the central part of the image frame, but it would be affected by the bright background, if the person doesn’t fill the central area completely, so the resultant image would be an underexposed person, with a fairly-well exposed background.

c) Spot Metering,

Would take a reading from a very small, (1-3 degree) circle, at centre of the frame, in the viewfinder. This small area of measurement, when placed on the subject in the frame, will not get any reading at all from the background, resulting in a correct exposure for the person, against an over-exposed background.

NOTE: Some cameras, notably Canon’s entry level dslrs are equipped with
“Partial Spot “metering, (5% to 10% of image area) which veers more towards centre-weighted metering.

Regards, Ken