Spot metering and D2...

[mobeyone]

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Anyone find it frustrating? takes a lot of time and can lose out on certain photos... are there benefits with the use of SM? or is it better without? I am trialing it at the moment but just looking for thoughts from others..

[daveleo]

i can't imagine how you could spot meter a *moving* subject and capture what you "saw" before it was gone.

i use it only for stationary subjects that are much darker or lighter that the overall image. generally i use center-weighted metering (even when i recompose after metering).

[Overgaard]

The way to use spot-metering would be to "pick" a metering in the scene.

 

Usually, to get a correct metering, you would have to find something middle-grey which could be middle-grey or a blue, yellow, reddish, skintone or other with the same "amount of tone" to it.

 

Because the lightmeter (any lightmeter) try to mesure the reflections of a middle grey surface.

 

So the spot metering is a great way to see light and know exactly what you are doing, and what consequences it has. And from there it's easy to change the metering by pointing the spot meter to something slightly darker (to make the camera over-expose) or something lighter (to make the camera under-expose).

 

Remember that you point the spot-meter, then lock the metering by pressing the release half down, then recompose, and shoot.

 

But as stated above, the middle-selected metering (matrix, center-weighted or whatever they call it) is very good in the D2 (and that one you can use to "lock" metering as well, thus control over/underexposure by pointing it towards lighter or darker areas).

[carlosecpf]

Remember that you point the spot-meter, then lock the metering by pressing the release half down, then recompose, and shoot.

 

I always found this puzzling. If I lock the metering, the D2 also locks the focus, right? And in several situations, by doing this the subject might be out of focus after recomposing. How you guys deal with that?

 

I thought about taking the meter reading, changing my D2 to manual exposure, set manually the correct exposure dictated by the meter, and then lock the focus on the subject, recompose and shoot. But this seems to me very cumbersome and might lead to miss some good pictures.

 

What do you guys recommend to speed up the process? Is that complicated or I am missing something?

 

Thanks!

[Overgaard]

You should choose something to lock the metering on that is in the desired focus range. The D2 doesn't exactly have narrow focusing range, so you have some freedom there.

 

Spot metering is great for "reading the light" and learn to see what is what.

 

But the other method (which I use mostly) is matrix metering where I shoot series of three and then get the preview in the finder. From that I know what the exposure time was and can turn manual right there. I never use Auto aperture but always fully open at f/2.0 or fixed aperture so the only change I make is the shutter time.

 

Using the matrix metering you also can point the center box towards something and lock the metering. Say you shoot from a room and there's strong light outside coming in. So you focus perhaps on the inside wall just next to the window, lock it and shoot. That will give you an over-exposed picture (according to a normal meter reading) but you "fooled" the camera by pointing and locking the metering to an inside darker wall.

 

Hope that make sense.

 

If you use Auto aperture and Auto exposure you can still go manual but it will require you to keep an eye on what was on what and then adjust both aperture and shutter manually.

[mobeyone]

I always found this puzzling. If I lock the metering, the D2 also locks the focus, right? And in several situations, by doing this the subject might be out of focus after recomposing. How you guys deal with that?

 

I thought about taking the meter reading, changing my D2 to manual exposure, set manually the correct exposure dictated by the meter, and then lock the focus on the subject, recompose and shoot. But this seems to me very cumbersome and might lead to miss some good pictures.

 

Thanks!

 

Same here and similar to my shall we say "frustrations"... hence the post.

 

Thanks Thorsten! I had a read of your website again after posting to try and find better ways of using the metering and your posts do as always help.

 

Out today to experiment!

[daveleo]

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i can only rephrase in my own words what Thorsten has already stated...

 

the D2 depth of field is huge compared to a "full frame" camera, so a seriously out-of-focus subject is hard to come by.

but if you seek perfection, you simply can't consistently get it by acting fast (at least i can't), and manual settings are the way to go (but again that takes time).

 

i get my favorite overall results by using center-weighted (or as Throsten says "whatever they call it") metering, aperture priority, set f2.8 - f4.0, set EV down -1/3 stop (my general preference .... sometimes even down -2/3), lock focus (i must use AF for my eyes) and exposure, recompose and shoot.

 

in the rare situations where i shoot in bright daylight (i habitually avoid doing this), i will set EV = 0.

 

the D2 algorythms (?) are remarkably close to what i desire, right out of the camera (jpg files), so i have learned to"trust its judgement" to the point that i have gotten pretty lazy about doing things manually for most situations. the EV correction is the only consistent tweak i use.

[krabat]

Focus lock connected with exposure-metering lock is not an issue for me, because I focus manually the desired object before metering exposure. Anyhow, I use autofocus only in very rare cases with the Digilux 2.

 

Best regards, Peter.

[comapedrosa]

Let me add to the above that in some situations the spot-meter on the D2 is a God-sent for me. Actually this touches one of the key benefits of an electronic viewfinder: it is WYSIWYG - you see your final image in the viewfinder!

 

In some complex light situations with a big dynamic range (backlit subjects, bright objects, sun-sets, overly light or dark skies, etc), i use the spot meter to get as close as possible as possible to the exposure i want, by simply trying different "spots" and locking (as described above re: AF) the exposure. I generally shoot jpeg, set my desired aperture (in 90% of the cases f2), and sometimes pre-focus. This approach takes away the guesswork that is inherent to any optical viewfinder (thought of course these have other benefits).

 

Here's an example. This is one of the very first pictures i took with the D2. I assume i spot-metered the water or the sky - away from the bridge and tree which cover most of the frame. Needless to say that for me the unique capabilities of an EVIL immediately came to light.

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[Jon Schick]

Rather than relying on different metering methods with the LC1 I've settled on using it in M mode, with the live histogram in the EVF.

 

I ignore the info that tells me whether the camera thinks I'm under or over exposing, and instead generally try to use the histogram to "expose to the right" without cutting off highlights. It seems to work extremely well and is very quick.

 

It won't be appropriate in every circumstance (eg if you deliberately want to take a "high key" photograph), but it is great for the vast majority of the time.

 

Sorry if this is something you normally do anyway, but if not, you might want to give it a try.

[krabat]

A very nice image, comapedrosa. I love this kind of pictures.

[jrethorst]

get my favorite overall results by using center-weighted (or as Throsten says "whatever they call it") metering,

I don't think these are the same. At Thorsten's Digilux 2 site, in "A side-note on metering methods", he compares multiple-field metering (another post calls this 'matrix') with center-weighted. They can produce quite different results.

[daveleo]

jrethorst

 

you are correct and i mistated that in my posting .... what i called "center weighted" is correctly called "multifield metering" in Leica terms.

 

what Leica (and Thorsten) call "center-weighted", i call "scene averaging".

 

so, correctily speaking, i use "multifield metering" most of the time...... must be more careful on my wording.

[Overgaard]

I'll have a look at my site because I always thought of it as center-weighted though it is really called multifield metering by most camera manufactures: It's the intelligent metering where the manufacturer has put a series of possible scenarios into the lightmeter so that it can figure out the correct exposure, based on meterings in different areas of the scene.

 

And it's the middle position of the three on the D2.

 

In effect it works so that when you change the center square in the EVF that will change the metering as well. I don't know how "intelligent" the multifield/matrix metering is in the D2, but it works very well in most cases.

[carlosecpf]

Really informative post! Thanks a lot for sharing your experiences here!

[MPerson]

Started reading this post and had a minor panic but reading the manual the settings stated are:

 

2 o'clock position = spot

3 o'clock position = multi-field

4 o'clock position = centre weighted

 

I use centre weighted as that is how my MP is configured as well and it gives me the results I like.

[daveleo]

i can't put this down just yet, so i re-read Thorsten's page and decided to shoot 3 of my own images, using black felt on white posterboard. the black felt covered the middle box in the viewfinder grid, so that's about 1/9 (11%) of the total image area.

i set B&W so as not to confuse myself with the lighting.

 

spot metering = 1.0 sec@ f3.2

multifield metering = 1/19 sec @ f3.2

centerweighted = 1/12 sec @ f3.2

 

the centerweighted certainly does centerweight (compared to multifield) as it slows shutter speed by almost 1/2 due to only 11% of the area being black. (i am going to try really hard not to reverse engineer what that algorythm is.)

 

last remark .... note that none of these auto-settings duplicate the real scene .... dead black on stark white.

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[Overgaard]

Interesting experiment.

 

So if you imagine you do that and place a small 18% grey (middle-grey) circle somewhere in the image, and then go to spot-metering and point that on the 18% grey circle, lock the exposure and recompose - then basically the image should expose correctly (which paper, black center, 18% grey circle).

 

The 100% dead-sure way to do it is using an external meter of the type with "white bubble" that you would lie on the paper and then it would measuring the incoming light - the light hitting the scene. That method is dead-sure because it gives you the amount of light without considerations as to what is in the scene. Just the light, whereas all lightmeters in cameras are based on the reflections from the scene, based on an expectancy that "all scenes are 18% black" ("middle-grey") - which they clearly aren't. Hence the trouble with white paper and black center.

 

To return to the original posts/question, that is why spot-metering can be very interesting to use - because it learns you to see what in a scene is the middle-grey area (or which has an equivalent contrast), lock on that and shoot. It brings understanding and control at which point it becomes simple to be a photographer.

[krabat]

In his nice experiment, daveleo applied the three metering methods the Digilux 2 provides and had exposure times of 1/19 s, 1/12 s and 1 s. Using the first two times, the black felt really appears black, whereas it appears grey with 1 s. Thorsten, the method you suggest would bring a good result, too. This would mean an increase of the exposure time to 1/8 s or 1/4 s. However, I am sure that the felt would not appear black any more, and the paper still would not be white. So, I have my doubts that it is possible to simultaneously image the felt in a deep black and the paper in a bright white - you always have to find a compromise.

The point is that there is a major difference between the human's visual system and a chip in a digital camera that we should take into account when discussing daveleo's experiment. In the retina, we have local receptive fields, leading among others to a locally different sensitivity of the retina and therefore of the visual perception. For a chip, this is not possible - there you have the same sensitivity and the same exposure time over the whole area of the chip. Moreover, we are moving our eyes quickly over short distances (the so-called saccades), and the resulted visual information is computed in the retina and the visual centres of the brain in an appropriate way so that we do not note these saccades but perceive an improved image of the world that is around us - with an extraordinary wide range of sensitivity, enhanced contrast and movement perception, and correct perception of black and white, which enables us, by the way, to look at a snowy landscape and to see the snow as a white matter and the trees as dark brown or even black objects.

 

Best regards, Peter.

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[daveleo]

i was very concerned that the auto-exposure images were not true black-to-white, and decided i needed to know that the D2 can record black to white in this case, so ....

 

i removed the black felt center, set f2.5 and manually adjusted the shutter speed to give EV= +2.0 (white is 2f-stops "over exposed", which should be pretty washed out .... actually should be 2.5 overexposed, but i was lazy)..... this got me to 1/8 sec shutter speed.

 

then replaced the black felt center, leaving f2.5 and 1/8 second and the results are below.

results are good .... white is white, black is black. (the apparent "vignetting" in the lower corners is because this was all handheld with the poster board leaning against a staircase and the axis was not exaclty perpendicular to the plane of the board ..... very scientific).

 

my apologies if it seems that i "hijacked" this thread ... but it was a very provocatve question that threw me a curve ball.

 

(also made me dig out my incident light meter and promise myself to get a new battery for it.)

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