Lessons
Photographic Characteristics
06:36 2Camera Types
02:53 3Shutter System
08:51 4Shutter Speed Basics
10:06 5Camera Settings Overview
16:02 6Camera Settings - Details
06:05 7Sensor Size: Basics
16:26 8Focal Length
11:26Practicing Angle of View
04:49 10Lens Speed
08:53 11Aperture
08:15 12Depth of Field (DOF)
12:32 13Lens Quality
06:56 14Light Meter Basics
08:54 15Histogram
11:38 16Dynamic Range
07:15 17Exposure Bracketing
07:59 18Focusing Basics
12:58 19Manual Focus
07:04 20Digital Focus Assistance
07:25 21Shutter Speeds & Depth of Field (DOF)
05:08 22DOF Preview & Focusing Screens
04:45 23Camera Movement
08:13 24Focus Stacking
07:48 25Lens Adaptors & Cleaning
08:24 26Flash & Lighting
04:37 27Tripods
14:03 28Cases
02:53 29Natural Light: Mixed
04:10 30Sunrise & Sunset Light
17:14 31Silhouette & Starburst: Sunrise & Sunset Light
05:25 32Golden Hour: Sunrise & Sunset Light
07:42 33Light Management
10:06 34Speedlights
04:02 35Built-In & Add-On Flash
10:37 36Editing Assessments & Goals
08:48 37Editing Set-Up
06:49 38Importing Images
03:49 39Culling Images
13:47 40Adjusting Exposure
07:53 41Remove Distractions
03:52 42Cropping Your Images
09:43 43Angle of View
14:25 44Framing Your Shot
07:17 45Foreground & Background & Scale
03:41 46Rule of Odds
04:50 47Visual Drama
12:20 48Elements of Design
09:14 49Texture & Negative Space
03:47 50Black & White & Color
10:23 51The Photographic Process
08:58 52What Makes a Great Photograph?
06:39Lesson Info
Light Meter Basics
all right. In this section, we're gonna be talking about exposure, which means shutter speeds, apertures, esos and a bunch of other things as well. And so there's a lot of things to talk about. This is, as I say, I think it's the crux of the class. So here's a list of the things that we're gonna be talking about in here. And let's start off with the light meter basics. So all of your cameras have light meters on him now. What's really important to a photographer is they want to know how much light is landing on their subject. If we know that, we will know exactly the right combination of exposure settings to get a perfect exposure. Back in the day, we used to use a handheld light meter this incident light meter, and they still sell these. You can still buy them, and you can go out and you basically go up to your subject. You press the little metering button on it, and it's gonna tell you right there in clear numbers. What I s o what shutter speed and what aperture? To get the absolute ...
perfect exposure because it knows exactly how much light is reaching that subject. But walking up to your subject is not always so easy, especially if you're photographing a mountain. You know you gotta walk a long ways to get there. It's fine if you're shooting a portrait, but it's not very convenient. And so what cameras have these days, and for many, many years is it reflected light meter. And what it does is it measures the light bouncing off of our subject going to the camera. Now. This is not as accurate, because now we have two sources. We have our light source, and then how much light is reflected by our subject, and our camera doesn't understand what the values and factors are of these. Now. The metering system in your camera is located probably pretty close to the focusing system for a lot of the, uh, sl ours with the muralist, it's slightly different. It's taking it off the sensor, but there's a sub mere behind the main near where it's reading this sort of light as you are actively looking through the camera muralist cameras air just doing it off the sensor. Now what they're doing is they're basing what they see as far as the amount of light coming in your hand camera. It's based off of the Kodak 18% gray card. At least Kodak used to sell at 18% great card when Kodak was a thing. But it's based off of a middle tone. Great, because it was figured that the world is kind of average about that brightness. And so it's a good middle tone brightness. But clearly not everything is middle tone grey. If you are shooting something that's gray, then it's perfect. Miss Middle Tone is going to give you a perfect exposure. The background, the lights, the darks are all gonna see perfect, where things get a little bit more difficult and challenging is when you're photographing something that's really dark. What happens is less light gets to your camera with light meter in your camera, says Oh my gosh, this thing is dark and then your camera using that information goes well. We better change shutter speeds apertures esos or something so that we get a neutral gray medium brightness subject. And so it wants to correct for this sort of problem, and it wants to lighten the subject up, and it lightens everything else around it up. And so if you're photographing something that's really bright, too much light is getting back to the camera, and it's thinking, Oh, my gosh, too much light. Let's darken this because nothing is really this bright, and it needs to wants to average it back down. And what's gonna happen is it's going to darken it and everything around it. Which is why sometimes when you photograph pictures in the snow, the snow seems kind of dark and dingy, and it isn't as bright as it should be. The camera doesn't understand snow is different than grass or anything else. And so what you have to be aware of is a photographer are things that are darker than average and lighter than average. The metering systems are pretty sophisticated these days and there really good. But you just have to be aware of these situations, that kind of fallout this fall, out of the standard norm of what the cameras expecting. Now, the way that this light meter works in your Cameron, the way that you get to interact with it is in your view finder On most cameras down along the bottom, there's gonna be what is known as a graphic light meter, which means there's gonna be a little indicator that's gonna move off to the side like this. If it is over exposed by one stop, it might look like this if it is under exposed by two stops, and then there's the third stop increments in there as well. And then if it's right in the middle, that's where you're getting your even exposure. Now there are some cameras that don't use the graphic light meter. They use a numeric light meter, and it's just simply a number. And it would tell you, if your one stop over exposed your plus one. And if you are under exposed by two, it's minus two, and so you have to pay very close attention to which number that is because there can be a lot of different numbers in there that mean different things, and if you're a proper exposure, it's just zero. I prefer the graphic light meter because it's nice and visual, and I think those things are easier to work with. So take a look in your camera and see how your camera is reading the light Now the way it reads the light in your camera, as with the meat oring mode that you have selected, and most cameras will have two or three or sometimes more modes selected. The traditional mode that was on most cameras to begin with was a center weighted mode. This was kind of the simplest metering system that they could develop. It's a little bit more sensitive in the middle and less sensitive out on the edges, and so it usually is measuring about 60% of the information on the inside and the other 40% on the stuff that's on the outside of the circle. So it's just weighted more towards the center of the frame. And this was good for subjects that were of average brightness and in the middle of the frame. Photographers then wanted to be a little bit more precise about subjects that did not fill up the frame, so the next thing we had was spot meters and so this was really good for smaller subjects that might be in front of a dark or light background. We can now measure the light on that one particular subject, and so spot meters have been very, very useful for for photographers in the past. For portrait photography, they might measure the skin tones, knowing that skin tones are usually around middle tone grey, sometimes one stop brighter. They could very precisely dial in what shutter speeds and apertures they wanted. Landscape photographers would take a spot meter out, and they would take multiple readings of the highlight areas, the shadow areas. And they would figure out the range of brightness that they're recording in one particular shot. And then they would select their exposure wherever they need to in that setting. And this could be, Ah, very time consuming project, doing this and then figuring it out, dialing a dad. And so it's not, you know, for your real quick picture taking, but it was very, very accurate. Nowadays, one of most popular meeting systems is what I would generally call a multi segment metering system, and what it does is it breaks the scene up into a lot of different areas, essentially spot meters, and then it compares and contrasts each of these little boxes and builds an algorithm for what the entire scene looks like. And what it can do is it can kind of disregard one errant bright spot or dark spot. But it gets a better understanding of the total brightness on the brightness variance from one area to the rest of the scene. And this is the type of system that will be accurate or close to accurate a very, very high percentage of the time. So looking at the three different options here, center weighted is good. If you have something in the middle that is of average brightness, the spot meter can be very helpful for pinpoint metering if you need to get a metering system reading off of a very small area. But for the most part, a lot of photographers like myself use the multi segment metering system, which, by the way, goes by a lot of different names. Canon calls it evaluative metering. Nikon calls matrix metering. I think Sony calls it multi segment metering. A lot of names like that in a lot of different symbols, but generally there's ah lot of areas that it's doing that measurement. It's gonna be really good, and with the advent of digital cameras and being able to see those images on the back of the camera, it's pretty easy to see if things are working or not. For those of you with muralist cameras, it's even better. You can just look at the screen and you can see if it's too bright or too dark in many cases. And I think these in a traditional light meter systems may not be around forever. I think there are better ways of reading light than these, but they do a good job, and the multi segment metering system is how I leave my camera most of the time on. That's because I manual exposure and I'm checking the back of the cameras will get into the next section, but it's going to do a good job, the predominant amount of time some people like to switch over to spot once in a while, and not too many people are using center weighted, but it's there for legacy reasons, and there's a few people who like that
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