I generally find that because I use the default metering method the most (Evaulative) i'm more experienced at learing to decide how to dial in my exposure compensation... I have used spot metering in the past, but found it always overestimated and got the exposure totally wrong, over/under exposing the entire scene dramatically.
I think most people tend to like spot metering very harsly lit scenes to prevent blowing out whites, for example the pure white plumage of a bird in bright sunshine. The camera will then always give you accurately exposed highlights providing the "spot" is in the right place, perhaps at the expense of the rest of the scene being almost totally dark. However some people are probably much better at spot metering with DSLRs than I am.
If your shooting landscapes with manual settings, it may benefit to use spot metering to calculate the correct exposue by taking different spot readings from the scene.
I actually have a handheld spot meter I use for shooting medium format film (617), the principal is the same in terms of metering off the highlights but as things are far more slowed down you can do all your exposure calculations. When spot metering a DSLR, things are quite often far more "action packed" and your simply relying on the camera whilst perhaps rattling off at 10fps.
With evaluative reading, the camera is always taking a large proportion of the light in the scene into consideration when making its decision on what shutter/aperture to set, with most modern DSLRs this is generally the most reliable method in my opinion.
Discussion
2 repliesI generally find that because I use the default metering method the most (Evaulative) i'm more experienced at learing to decide how to dial in my exposure compensation... I have used spot metering in the past, but found it always overestimated and got the exposure totally wrong, over/under exposing the entire scene dramatically.
I think most people tend to like spot metering very harsly lit scenes to prevent blowing out whites, for example the pure white plumage of a bird in bright sunshine. The camera will then always give you accurately exposed highlights providing the "spot" is in the right place, perhaps at the expense of the rest of the scene being almost totally dark. However some people are probably much better at spot metering with DSLRs than I am.
If your shooting landscapes with manual settings, it may benefit to use spot metering to calculate the correct exposue by taking different spot readings from the scene.
I actually have a handheld spot meter I use for shooting medium format film (617), the principal is the same in terms of metering off the highlights but as things are far more slowed down you can do all your exposure calculations. When spot metering a DSLR, things are quite often far more "action packed" and your simply relying on the camera whilst perhaps rattling off at 10fps.
With evaluative reading, the camera is always taking a large proportion of the light in the scene into consideration when making its decision on what shutter/aperture to set, with most modern DSLRs this is generally the most reliable method in my opinion.
Eval metering does well in conjunction with the exposure compensation button and the histogram.
When it fails I tend set manual and spotmeter of the nearest middle grey, alternatively use an incident meter.
T