Hi everyone,
I'm pretty new at photography so bear with me.
I guess if someone just wants to expose "properly" as seen by the camera, then yes I guess you can trust the "0" on your meter and try to expose appropriately.
But what if you want to expose to what your eyes actually sees? For example, at night when it is dark, if you were to simply try to expose to "0", then the scene would look in fact brighter than what your eyes actually sees, meaning the camera would try to bring that darkness closer to that 18% gray.
So then in the dark, it seems normal that your meter would show you to be much in the shadow region, as this is what it is in reality.
My question then is, is there a way to meter accurately (with the different metering modes) a scene based on what your eyes sees? Apart from taking test shots, I don't see how we can accurately judge that a dark scene for example, shown by your meter to be in the shadows is accurately representing what your eyes can see.
Same would go for the opposite scene where you have say a snowy landscape with lots of white in it, to be accurately metered, your meter would have to show you are overexposed to be right.
I don't see how we can meter for this apart from taking test shots.
Am I right in thinking this?
Thanks.
That is how things like the Ansel Adams Zone System came to be. If you photograph something like a color checker with its grayscale, you can see the darkest darks and the lightest lights and everything in between in equal steps. You can place the grass at the fifth step or anywhere you want. The meter puts middle grey more like 12-13% for most cameras, but if something of middle value in the world ends up around the middle on the image you are pretty close. You can slide things up and down quite a bit from there.
Some of this comes with experience, with individual sensors behaving a bit differently. Back in film days it was more or less a rule of thumb that you'd compensate +2 for snow, and -2 for night time cityscapes. The meter, though it's often right for average situations, is a starting, not and ending point.
Once upon a time, film came in little boxes that included a brief summary of recommended exposures, similar to the "sunny 16" meterless rules, and these amounted to rough incident-light values, which when used were independent of the subject matter.
Test shots are probably the easiest way to get used to the different conditions and how to handle them, especially since digital shots are essentially free. Find difficult lighting situations, and see what needs to be done to get them right. Eventually you'll be able to guess in advance what you need when you see it.
If your camera offers a spot meter function, you can also use that often to find what you want in your final scene to be the mid point. Meter for that, and either set it manually or hold it. If you can't find a neutral-gray patch, you can spot meter a ratio of light and dark that averages to it. It takes a bit of practice to do this, and to determine just how much of the view you see is in the meter spot but if you assume it's more or less a circle a bit bigger than the center focus spot, you'll be close. Spot metering can be easier than trying to evaluate the whole image.
I have often thought of how the eye measures and exposes a scene versus what the camera can do to best create that scene. One must remember that the human eye is, by far, the best metering optic available - it doesn't blow out highlights or lose detail in shadow (ok, I know we cant't see really well in darkness, but you get what I mean). In the human eye each optical receptor can measure and vary "exposure" across the whole scene. It's realy the perfect sensor. Whereas a camera that may have many pixels in its' sensor can only take a (weighted) average exposure when you press the shutter release.
In future, I see the technology approcahing what the human eye can do by varying the exposure of each individual pixel. Actually, I bet some of the bigger companies are already working on this.
For the time being, a suitable solution is to take multiple, bracketed exposures of the scene and create an HDR*, or some camreas have in-body HDR functionality.
*Just don't overcook the HDR or you will get the "HDR look" that I find looks horrible.
Peter
Canon recently launched such a sensor.
Not pixel based, but with zones.
Canon calls it "Exposure by Area" function.
The road to pixel-based solutions is likely to be long.
A suitable analogy could maybe be the area of TV technology,
where there are also zone-based (FALD LCD)
and pixel-based (OLED) technologies exist.
https://fstoppers.com/gear/canon-develops-unique-sensor-impressive-trick-better-dynamic-range-624726
I guess if someone just wants to expose "properly" as seen by the camera, then yes I guess you can trust the "0" on your meter and try to expose appropriately.
Trust no one! The camera will change its mind as you go through different metering modes such as "spot", "average", "centre-weighted" and "matrix/multi/evaluative/whatever-a-smart-AI-metering-mode-is-called". All these modes have the same task - they try to make some part of the image to look as bright as "middle grey" in your JPEG images. Which part depends on the scene and on the mode. The smarter the mode, the less control you have over the appearance of your image.
To answer your question, try experimenting with the "spot metering". If you see something in the scene that looks "middle grey" to your eye, just point the spot metering at that thing and the camera will adjust exposure parameters so that thing will look "middle grey" in the resulting JPEG image.
What if there is nothing obviuos with the luminance of middle grey in the scene? You can combine spot metering with exposure compensation: use +2EV to spot meter off something which looks matt white to your eye or use -2EV to spot meter off something which looks matt black.
If you find "spot metering" too fiddly, change to "average metering" and apply exposure compensation using the same logic. If the image is mostly dark (black cat in the coal mine), dial in somewhere between -1EV and -2EV. If the image is mostly light (white cat in the snow), dial in somewhere between -1EV and -2EV. The "average metering" is quite predictable in a sense that it expects everything look grey. All cats are grey to it. Any form of "smart metering" will try guessing the colour of your cat and it might get it right or it might get it wrong. The pros and cons of automation.
If the image is mostly light (white cat in the snow), dial in somewhere between -1EV and -2EV.
Oups... That's obviously "+1EV and +2EV", but I don't seem to be able to change my post to fix this typo.
To me the easiest and most accurate way to control exposure doesn't even need a meter. I use blinkies instead to find the highest exposure that won't blow out the brightest thing I care about. It takes a little trial and error to set up, since the raw gives a little more latitude than what the blinkies show. I find on my setup I can find the highest non-blinkie exposure, then add 2/3 stop to that and still be confident I've not blown the brights. That gives maximum room in post to adjust within the full range the camera can deliver.
@bleirer What you describe will work for people who shoot exclusively raw and don't care about JPEG images which will be completely blown in this approach. This technique is called ETTR.
Some people expose for JPEG, meaning they are not planning to adjust the brightness of every single image in post. They get a usable JPEG straight out of the camera and have a raw file as an insurance.
There are pluses and minuses to each approach. The important point is that one has to decide whether they are exposing for raw or for SOOC JPEG before they press the shutter. The mindset is quite different.
I'm not that worried about ettr, though I am well familiar with it. I'm more interested in placing my brights and the rest of the values where I want them but mostly to do that without blowing brights I want to hold detail in. The other ways to do this are kind of clunky even knowing what part of a scene is indeed the brightest. A quick check with blinkies and I see the parts that start to flash first as I raise exposure are the brightest in the scene. If I care about them I can protect them and be absolutely sure they are safe.
@bleirer You clearly are worried about ETTR - as every digital photographer should be:)
The Zone System is highly relevant only in film photography where placing tones in the appropriate place on the tonal scale determines how the image will look when output as a print.
A film’s response to light is non-linear (as is the human eye’s) and corresponds to what is known as an S-shaped gamma/tone curve where the highest and lowest tones require progressively more exposure to produce an incremental increase in image brightness.
A digital sensor behaves in a fundamentally different way. Digital exposure is linear with each stop of exposure producing a doubling of perceived brightness across the entire recordable tonal range – meaning that, unlike film, no tone curve is applied which in turn, means that each F-stop records half of the light of the previous one which in turn, means that the brightest stop (the one closest to the right side of the histogram) contains 50% of all the digital data in the file. The next stop down contains 25%..and so on…which in turn, means that if you do not use the right-hand fifth of the histogram you are in fact throwing away fully half of the available encoding values of your camera before you start.
The exposure meter is an accurate, but very dumb instrument, essentially calibrated (from the days of film) to mid-grey and takes no account of the fact that digital exposure is linear and, by extrapolation, that capturing as much data as is possible short of saturating the sensor is the only way to optimise digital exposure. It also gives the lie to those who persist in clinging to the old nonsense that the in-camera appearance of an image is, in some way, a personal, artistic or creative choice. It isn’t. It’s just throwing away valuable image data with all the penalties that accompany that choice.
Optimal digital exposure is about maximising data capture. That means applying the greatest possible exposure to the sensor short of saturation. The histogram rules – and even that is misleading in that it reflects the JPEG exposure rather than the true RAW.
The best RAW capture is ironically likely the one which looks pretty horrible in the camera LCD – both too bright and too flat.
There is no Zone System in RAW digital capture. The Zone System in digital photography belongs in the realm of post-processing. Once you have as much data as the sensor can capture, you can rearrange it (and thus the Zones of the tonal range) in the editing process to your heart’s content – to correspond to whatever visualisation you want. However, if you fail to capture all the data, you are effectively dealing with a file depleted of information with the accompanying penalties of a truncated tonal scale, reduced detail and an increase in noise. It's amusing when I read heated arguments about image quality between photographers who have, by exposing in the way described, unwittingly binned half their image data before they even get to look at their images.
Control of the tonal range is a significant skill, but in digital photography, it’s an entirely different skill from the one required in the world of film.