Semi Auto Part 2
So i hope you’ve went to play around with what you’ve learnt in the last lesson.
Next up – Exposure
So now we know about the iso settings. Keep that in mind as u can use it throughout the manual control settings of the camera. NB. Settings explained according to Canon 400D and some older and newer models.
As we probably all know that sometimes our camera’s somehow miscalculate the exposures of photo’s like you wanna capture ambient light but the pictures come out too bright or too dark, this is probably because of the metering mode on the camera.
What the metering mode does is, reads light from your frame and the camera does its calculations according to it. There are 3 basic metering modes.
Evaluative Metering – Calculates according to light from the whole scene.
Center-Weighted Averaging – Calculates according to the center of the frame
Spot AE Point – Calculates from a very small point in the middle of the scene.
I suggest maybe reading up about it as it comes in handy in tricky lighting situations.
The thing about metering modes is there is a way to override it.
Do you see the little * button on the camera? Thats called the f lock button or exposure lock button. What it does is locks the exposure of a certain scene for about 20 seconds.
Example : Your subject is well lit but the background is also well lit. What the camera does is it takes in the light reading from the whole scene. Your background might be brighter than your subject, in most cases this is true, when snapping that image your subject /s will turn up kinda dark on the photo. Good for silhouettes but bad if you actually want the subject lit up nicely.
What we would do is then go in close to our subject, focus on it making sure u get no bright background in, hit the * f lock button and it will lock the exposure for your subject. Quickly recompose the shot and take it. You’ll see your subjects well lit but your background is very much overexposed. Nothing we can do about the bright background unless we shooting with a flash, but lets leave the flash out for now.
Go try the f lock out see how you can use it in different situations.
