Gratitude

Dog Blog Post #879

Photography Assignment

- For a warm, safe, snuggly place to sleep

- For Uncle Zachary - the best-est friend ever

- For yummy food and nice long walks

… and cookies

LOTS of cookies.

Daily Dog Challenge "388. Gratitude - It's nice to think about what you're thankful for.

Our Daily Challenge - Nov 22, 2012 - "Getting to the Point - Whether its the point of what a holiday means to you, the point of an argument or the point of a big idea, or merely the point of a fork or the very fine point at the pinnacle of a friend's head -- the interpretation is up to you."

Beautiful Light - Camera Tip

I think I've finally figured out Spot Exposure Metering on my dSLR camera.

The default metering (and I believe this is true of many/most dSLRs) is Matrix Metering, where the "camera meters a wide area of the frame and set[s] exposure according to tone distribution, color, composition, and [depending on lens] distance information." (cut-n-pasted from the PDF user manual.)

Then you have Center-weighted Metering, where the "Camera meters entire frame but assigns greatest weight to center area" - about 8 mm in diameter, depending on the lens being used. According to the docs, a useful thing for portraits.

Finally, you have Spot Metering, which only looks at 3.5 mm (2.5% of frame) centered at your focus point.

It's that last part that makes the pictures I took here work, especially the first shot directly below.

The focus point for that shot was centered on the nice contrasty diagonal line of Zachary's upper eye-lid (according to Aperture 3). Had I used Matrix metering, the camera would have exposed the picture to try and even out my sun-bathed Zachary and the lost-in-shadow rest of the living room. This would have resulted a totally bleached out Zachary.

Ewww.

By switching to spot metering, the camera is now looking at just the area around his eye and has totally ignored the rest of the image. This resulted in a perfectly exposed Zachary, and the rest of the image mercifully going to black (note to self: vacuum and dust living room.)

Just remember to switch it back to Matrix Metering when you are done, or you're going to wonder why the pictures you take the next day look terrible!

FWIW: My first little Sony Cyber-Shot (DSC-W55) point-n-shoot could have taken any of the above, with the possible exception of the off-center shot of Zachary, without me having to do a darn thing.

Don't believe me?

Here's one of the first shots (the SIXTH shot, to be precise) I ever uploaded to flickr, way back on Jan 17 2011, of a young Henry taken with said little camera.

Oh the irony!


Editor's Note: On the Nikon D7000, the exposure metering button is a little button with a funky window-pane image on it on the top of the camera near the shutter release button - the button that is NOT the much more frequently used exposure compensation (+/-) button.


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