Sanjaal Photography

In photography world, the term Metering Mode refers to the way in which a camera determines the exposure.

Depending upon the Camera you have, you many find different metering modes provided in the camera. Some of them may slightly vary in their names. These metering modes allow the user to select the most appropriate one for use in a variety of lighting conditions while shooting the photographs.

The following are normal metering modes available in most of the camera.

• Evaluative Metering
• Partial Metering
• Spot Metering
• Center Weighted Average Metering

(I have a Canon EOS 5D Mark II DSLR and these are the metering modes provided by that camera)

Evaluative Metering:

• This metering mode is also known as Multi-zone Metering, Matrix Metering, Honeycomb Metering, Segment Metering, Eletro Selective Pattern Metering or Automatic Multi-Pattern metering
• On most of the camera, this is a standard metering mode.
• This is an all-around metering mode suited for portraits and even backlit subjects.
• The camera sets the exposure automatically to suit the scene.
• Here the camera measures the light intensity in several points in the scene, and then combines the results to find the settings for the best exposure.
• A number of factors are taken into consideration while calculating the exposure, including the following: Autofocus (AF) point, distance to subject, areas in focus or out of focus, colours/hues of the scene, and backlighting.
• This metering mode is little biased in exposure towards the auto-focused areas.
• A database of many thousands of exposures is pre-stored in the camera, and the processor can use a selective pattern to determine what is being photographed.

Partial Metering:

• Partial Metering is effective when the background is much brighter than the subject due to backlighting etc.
• This metering mode covers around 8% of the view finder area at the center.
• This mode meters a larger area than spot metering (around 10-15% of the entire frame in some cameras), and is generally used when very bright or very dark areas on the edges of the frame would otherwise influence the metering unduly.
• Like spot metering, some cameras can use variable points to take readings from, (in general autofocus points), or have a fixed point in the centre of the viewfinder. Partial metering is found mostly on Canon cameras.

Spot Metering:

• This is for metering a specific part of the subject or a scene.
• The metering is weighted at the center covering around 3.5% of the view finder area (in canon cameras), and normally between 1-5% in general.
• Spot metering is very accurate and is generally not influenced by other areas in the frame.
• This metering mode is commonly used to shoot very high contrast scenes. One such example according to Wikipedia is if the subject’s back is being hit by the rising sun and the face is a lot darker than the bright halo around the subject’s back and hairline.
• Spot metering allows the photographer to measure the light bouncing off the subject’s face and expose properly for that instead of a much brighter light in the background.
• Another good example of spot metering usage would be when photographing the moon. Due to the very dark nature of the scene, other metering methods tend to overexpose the moon.
• Spot metering will allow more detail to be brought out in the moon while underexposing the rest of the scene.

Center Weighted Average Metering:

• This metering is weighted at the center and then averaged for the entire scene.
• In this system, the meter concentrates between 60 to 80 percent of the sensitivity towards the central part of the viewfinder.
• The balance is then “feathered” out towards the edges.
• Some cameras will allow the user to adjust the weight/balance of the central portion to the peripheral one.
• One advantage of this method is that it is less influenced by small areas that vary greatly in brightness at the edges of the viewfinder; as many subjects are in the central part of the frame, consistent results can be obtained.

(This article is written based on Canon’s EOS 5D Mark II user manual and Wikipedia’s article on Metering with Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License )

The following is a video from youtube that nicely explains some of the metering modes.

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