Blue Pixel

Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010 by Reed Hoffmann

I got my first 35mm SLR camera when I was fourteen. Forty years later I'm still learning, and that's one of the things I love about photography.

My kids have been in theater and dance for years now, from elementary through high school. Consequently, I’ve spent a lot of time photographing people on stage. As anyone who’s done that will tell you, it’s a challenging situation. The light is often uneven, and intense at times. Plus, the background’s usually much darker than the performer. It’s a constant dance adjusting exposure while checking highlights and histograms. Recently I shot another school musical and tried a new method for exposure. And boy, did it work great.

I’ve always been a big fan of Matrix (sometimes called Evaluative) metering and exposure compensation. That combination has helped me work quickly in all kinds of situations. However, when you’re photographing people in spotlights, you’re often changing your framing from tight to loose. When you do that the ratio of light to dark areas changes dramatically, so some shots need no exposure compensation while others may require minus two or three. That results in lots of over or under-exposed pictures. Recently I’ve had a number of questions about when to use spot metering, and thought, “this could be it.”

Spot Metering gathers exposure information from a very small circle in the center of the viewfinder. In the past I rarely used it because it often meant reading the exposure, locking or setting that manually, then re-framing for the composition I wanted. Not a fast way of working. But that was based on the old style of spot metering. Today’s cameras usually tie the spot meter area to the active focus point, so you’re not locked into the center of the frame. That means if I set the focus for “Continuous,” and then move the focus point to the subject’s face in the composition I want, it will expose for the face while tracking their movement. Using Nikon cameras with the 51-point autofocus system, I can move that active dot over a wide area of the viewfinder to put it wherever I want without sacrificing composition. And using it that way for the recent musical, my exposure “hit” rate (good ones) was over 90%, far higher than my old way of doing it.

Next year I’ll hit forty years since I first picked up an SLR camera, and I’m still learning. That’s one of many things I love about photography – there’s always room for improvement, and new techniques to learn and try. With a little luck, I’ll get another forty years, and I hope I’m still learning right up to the end.