Your camera's light meter assumes every scene should be middle gray, which is why it gets exposure wrong. Learn how spot, center-weighted, and matrix metering each sample light differently, and when to use each one for sharper subjects, legacy framing, or full-frame evaluation.
Your camera is an idiot. Your camera has no idea what it's looking at. So you may be wondering, how does it figure out how bright or dark your photo should be? Well, it does that by relying on a meter, and that meter has 3 different modes. Those modes are spot metering, center-weighted, and matrix or scene metering. So let's talk about each one of those, how to use them, why to use them, and where they fail. Let's talk about spot metering first. Spot metering looks at the area that you focused on. Know, those little red points that are in your camera. It's going to set the brightness based on the area around that spot. This is really helpful if you have a big difference between your subject and the background. It doesn't know if what you're photographing is really dark blue or really bright red. The meter just wants it to be middle gray. Now you might think, okay, what's middle gray? Middle gray is 18% between absolute black and absolute white. It's Basically the area in the middle of where the camera can capture detail. But it may not be true to life. After all, if your subject is very dark, you probably want it to have detail but still appear dark. If your subject is very bright, you probably want it to have detail but appear pretty bright. But what about those other metering modes that I mentioned? So center-weighted is a little bit like spot metering. It's going to limit what it's reading in terms of the brightness to the middle part of the frame. It's not going to be as tiny as that spot. And basically this is a holdover from the olden days when cameras first had meters added to them. In those days, the meter was right in the center. And because you were using film, things were complicated. If you are a boomer who is scared of change,
I say beat kids
appropriately, then center-weighted is probably the right meter setting for you. That leaves us with matrix metering. What is matrix metering or scene metering? Well, it looks at the entire photo that you're taking a picture of and determines the brightness based on that. But remember, all of these are looking for middle gray. So matrix metering, scene metering is looking at the entire scene and it's trying to get as much of that scene to be middle gray, or in other words, to have the information in there that has detail in it before it becomes totally white or totally black. Look for future videos from me and always remember, your camera is an idiot.
