Light Meter Exercise

Part 4.

“If you’re not completely sure how your light meter works, try this exercise. Set your camera to
any of the auto or semi-auto modes. Photograph a dark tone (such as a black jacket), a mid-tone
(the inside of a cereal packet traditionally makes a useful grey card) and a light tone (such as a
sheet of white paper), making sure that the tone fills the viewfinder frame (you don’t have to
focus). You might be surprised to see that the histograms for each of the frames are the same.
If there’s not much tonal variation in your subject you’ll see a narrow spike at the mid-tone;
if there is tonal variation such as detail you’ll get more of a gentle curve. If you find the tone
curve isn’t centred on the mid-tone, make sure that you have your exposure compensation set
to zero. You may see an unpleasant colour cast if you’re shooting under artificial light, in which
case you can repeat using your monochrome setting.”

Exposure compensation makes a photograph brighter or darker. In auto modes, the camera chooses the exposure compensation. The camera, however, cannot always guess what you were trying to achieve. It will set as auto to not over/under expose a photo, but in some cases, that may be exactly what we are aiming for. Therefore, there is an exposure compensation meter, on which you can choose to set it to zero, or to a +/- exposure.

When taking the photos as suggested, the first time I took the photo of the black card, my histogram was way off to the left. I had set the camera to 1/4000, to allow less light so the image would come out black.

The exercise says if this happens, set your exposure compensation to zero and try again. I have to be honest, I did not know what that meant or how to do it! So I had a look and found a YouTube video to explain. [1]. When i went to retake the image of the black card, it was later in the day, and I used AV mode rather than TV, which gave me the peak in the middle rather than to the side.

This exercise reminded me of another in part one. We had to look at the histograms of photos. I’ve re read that just to remind myself. The post can be found here. [2]

● [1] Canon rebel tutorial: How to use exposure compensation (2011). [YouTube video]. At: https://youtu.be/ZBOo1aOb3IE (Accessed 21/08/20).

● [2] Sarah Gough (2019) Project 1, Exercise 1.1: The Instrument. At: https://sarahgoughoca.home.blog/2019/02/22/project-1-exercise-1-1-the-instrument/ (Accessed 21/08/20).