I am sorry Derek, I must say watching now my fourth of your videos has almost brought a tear to my eye (Why you may ask) because I am so so blow away with how Georges you make a still image look and as you’ve said in an earlier video that you’ve bred a photographer since the early 1950s I am loving both your level of experience combined with a good editing program like Lr. Much Respect to you good Sir. Cheers from a sponge-like wide-eyed beginner... Me 📸 👍🏻
Thank you for your most generous comments! I presume you are familiar with my RU-vid channel, if not here is the link: ru-vid.com Best wishes and thanks.
Derek Forss, Another very good video, thank you. Spot metering appears to have gone out of fashion with some professional photographers. This video certainly reinforces my use of it in certain scenarios.
Thank you, for this nice video regarding spot metering. Regarding spot metering I have noticed Olympus provides different flavours of spot metering, the regular one as we used to do with a classic (spot) light meter with needs user intervention for correct exposure. or do you use the camera spot metering for hilights instead. There is even a spot metering for the shadows... The classic metering mode is that the lightmeter always interpretes everything as grey. As a photographer you had to interprete the results by correcting with the right exposure compensation. I grow up in a time when light meters were still needed, switched to centre weighted metering as this was the norm on older camera's. Kept using it as I found the evaluative ESP metering kind of erratic as the camera dicides what exposure you needed. I understand this is fairly complex matter and differs also if you are shooting digital, chemical negative or positive (slide) film. With digital I consider my camera loaded with slide film and expose accordingly. Please, advise. With regards,
I don't use the Spot-metering presets as I don't like having my hands tied. I judge the correct exposure by locating the optimum position with the help of the electronic finder, so I execute it visually. If this is not the required composition, I half-depress shutter button to lock and hold, recompose and fully depress shutter button to take picture.
Derek, I've only recently found your channel and have been enjoying it quite a bit. I'm learning as well. Soon, I'll be traveling to London and will almost certainly find myself inside churches and cathedrals so I've been watching your videos on photographing in such environments. Regarding this video on spot metering, I have one question. In your example using Lightroom, the first step you have is to change the profile to Adobe Landscape. What profile would you use for interior photos? Also what would you use for white balance for interiors? Thank you so much.
When saving an image to RAW you have greater flexibility in what happens in Lightroom, you can even change your mind later if the original RAW file is saved, which I archive. Because of this it is not that important how you set the camera for white balance because it can be changed in Lightroom. In churches I often leave white balance on Auto because of the mixture of light, outside daylight or cloudy according to weather. Changing the profile to Adobe Landscape is a personal tweak because it slightly intensifies the colours, particularly landscapes. For other subjects experiment and judge by your eyes in the knowledge that it can be changed later. Hope this is helpful.
Trying to get a handle on your spot metering technique. I understand the half press and recompose. Just wondering if this is achievable with using the back button focus method. I have always used bbf, but I may have to go back to linking with shutter button
Hi Derek, I have enjoyed and benefited from many of your RU-vid videos. I certainly agree with you emphasis on the importance of spot metering. What I have done is used the camera's [OMD EM1 ii] histogram to set exposure. To improve metering I have set the limits of the histogram at 10 and 245. I then see underexposed areas as blue in the viewfinder and overexposed as orange. I adjust settings so that the orange is eliminated and adjust .3EV beyond that. Is this process equivalent to spot metering as you have described?
Hello Stephen, thank you for your comments, always interesting to receive another point of view. When creating my programmes I have to be aware that there is always another way of achieving a similar end result to the one I describe. My way of spot-metering is different to the way you describe. Using the electronic finder and spot-metering from the centre of the screen, I select that part of the image by moving the camera around until the light intensity shows the exposure that visually I am trying to achieve. At this point it doesn't matter if the composition is not correct, but by half-depressing the shutter button I can lock the exposure and recompose before depressing the shutter button fully with the locked settings. If necessary, I make corrections in Lightroom afterwards. This is described in some detail from around 2 minutes in the programme. Hope this is helpful. I am not saying that your method is incorrect, but what I am showing is different. Hope this is helpful but use the technique best for you!
