Use Spot Metering - Better Photos... Now!

Pop quiz!  You're at a wedding.  You're getting ready to take a quick photo of the groom.  He's fair-skinned, wearing a black tuxedo, standing in front of an amazing sunset.  Which part of this scene will your camera use to meter the exposure for this shot?  Which part of this scene do you want to be properly exposed?

Chances are you want his skin to be properly exposed.  If your camera exposes for the sunset, everything else will be underexposed because of how bright the sky is compared to everything else.  If your camera exposes for the tuxedo, everything else will be overexposed because of how dark it is.  If your camera happens to find the grooms's head and expose for it, you'll probably have a slightly blown out sky and slightly underexposed tux, but at least you'll know who it's a photo of.

Most situations you encounter aren't going to be this extreme, but what happens when you've got to get the shot and don't have all day to figure out the exposure?  Better yet, what happens when your camera isn't giving you the results you want and you need to take control?  Time to learn how to use spot metering!

Spot metering is very similar to spot focusing.  Your camera has lots of metering modes that it can use to determine exposure.  Spot metering just uses one small part of your composition (usually the point of focus) to determine exposure.  That means that if you're focusing on a person's face, you'll also get an exposure reading for that person's face, not her clothing or the sky behind her.

Using spot metering has allowed me to get some shots that I might have otherwise missed.  For example, at a recent engagement session in Golden, the sun was setting behind the mountains faster than we thought it would.  I literally had seconds to get a few shots with the last golden rays of sunlight backlighting Veronica and Luke.  Because I was able to meter off of their faces (and not the bright sunlight behind them), I got the correct exposure and some great shots that look different than anything else we got that day.

While there might be a time and a place for different focusing modes, I don't think I'll ever have a reason to take my exposure metering off of spot metering (at least not for portraiture).  Here are a few more examples of shots that would have been very tough to get with any other type of metering than spot metering...

In this photo of Mia, I'm basically shooting into the sun,
which is not an easy situation for a camera to meter.

For an image like this, the camera would have likely tried to set a long exposure.  I wanted a very short exposure
to capture the shape of the flames, so I metered off of the flames, not the logs.

Here's another photo shooting into a light source.  The difference
here is that the rest of the room was fairly dark, so I had no
idea if it would try to expose for the light or the darkness.

I hope you see how useful spot metering can be.  Whether you're looking for creative control or just confidence in your exposure, spot metering is very useful to master.

Read all of my DSLR tips here.