Spot meter & manual mode

[zcar21]

I finally went full manual exposure. Here's a little background:

When I had the canon xt I used it in center weighted metering + EC, and I had pretty constant results. After I switched to the 30d I tried evaluating and center weighted metering and the camera kept underexposing and sometimes overexposing so I finally put the camera in manual mode and spot metering to get the results I want. I had tried it before but I was pretty slow and ended up going back to Av. I kept turning the dial the opposite direction.

Sometimes the metering area is bigger than what I want to meter of. If I zoom will the camera compensate or do I have to meter at the same focal length?
Also, any tips to get faster other than the obvious practice.

Thanks.

 

[MTVision]

I may be wrong but - i would think if you get really close (or zoom) and fill your viewfinder with what you want to meter off then the size of the spot meter wouldn't really matter. Then you'd adjust settings and zoom back out to take shot. You'd have to use exposure lock if you were shooting in aperture and/shutter priority mode though

 

[zcar21]

The reason I ask is because I noticed a small change, but zooming in should make it more precise right?

 

[Patrice]

Zooming your lens in/out will not change the size of the metering circle as that happens inside the camera and not inside the lens. If your lens is a variable aperture zoom then make sure to set your aperture after you have reframed your shot if you are working anywhere near your lens' maximum aperture.

 

[Henrycrafter]

Okay! I am probably going to get in a lot of trouble over this but here goes.
ONLY MY OPINION!
I have run into this problem over and over again.
I have been shooting for money for over 40 years.
The way I dealt with the issue was this.
I went back to using my hand held Luna-pro SBC light meter.
My problems went away. Just because this works for me does not mean it works for everybody.
However I believe it is worth consideration.

 

[Derrel]

Canon's color-blind light and flash metering in the 5D and 30D (and most other bodies they have made for the past 20 years) causes a LOT of problems when shooting run-n-gun. A "smarter" camera can do a lot better on both ambient- and flash-metering. Shooting digital is most like shooting color slide film; one needs to expose so that the highlight areas are NOT over-exposed at all, or are at least less than one stop over,or less, with most cameras. A dumb camera that cannot tell the color of anything it is pointed at will tend to mess up the exposure on things that are significantly brighter or darker than medium-toned.

Spot metering requires a reasonably educated user to work the best. In Manual exposure modes, using evaluative metering is not a good idea; center-weighted is a better method to use when the camera is in Manual exposure mode. When shooting in "extreme" situations or with "extreme" subjects, many automatic light metering modes can be fooled. With most digital SLR's, an INCIDENT LIGHT METER reading is a good place to start when the subjects are overly dark or light, and one wants consistent exposures.

 

[zcar21]

I find that evaluating light tones is fairly easy, for example, when photographing a person with light skin I'll just meter off the face and set it to +1 to get a pretty good exposure. However, depending on the last picture taken turning the dial might take a few seconds.

If the same person has very dark hair, I'll need to make sure I'm metering only the face. If I zoom in, even though the aperture stays the same, there's a slight change in the exposure it seems to me. I'm not sure if zooming is helping or not.