Light Meter Research
"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). "
Auto Mode
Black Grey White
Still learning about my camera and how it works I thought I would give this exercise a go. I put my camera in auto mode and soon realised that without any contrast or differentiation in colour for the camera to focus on I needed to use manual focus rather than trying to use the auto focus function.
I used coloured paper for this exercise; black for a dark tone, grey for a mid tone and white for a light tone. After looking at the histograms for each exposure, I can see how in auto mode, they are all fairly similar with a spike at the mid tone. The only exposure that stands out is that of the black paper. I would think this is because I shot these images in natural light in a conservatory on a sunny day and there may have been some slight contrast being caused by the suns reflection on the paper.
It's interesting to see how the camera translates and tries to correct an exposure.
"Set your camera to manual mode. Now you can see your light meter! The mid- tone exposure is indicated by the ‘0’ on the meter scale with darker or lighter exposures as – or + on either side. Repeat the exercise above, this time adjusting using your either your aperture or shutter to place the dark, mid and light tones at their correct positions on the histogram. The light and dark tones shouldn’t fall off either the left or right side of the graph."
Manual Mode
Black Grey White
Moving on with the exercise, I put my camera in manual mode and re shot the coloured paper. I could now see the light meter, a tool I had only played around with a few times but never really understood fully. I tried to get an even exposure for each coloured bit of paper, adjusting shutter speed and aperture to keep the light meter at 0.
You can see from the histograms above, how each exposure is completely unique. The black paper sits more towards the left of the histogram with a gradual staircase spike moving up from the left. The grey mid tone has a smooth curve up and sits more or less in the middle of the histogram without any harsh spikes. The white is edging towards the right hand side of the histogram and has multiple spikes at the top and gradually starts to staircase down towards the right.
Reflection
This exercise has definitely been beneficial for me. I was really struggling to grasp the idea of using full manual mode but now it doesn't seem so daunting. Having the understanding of how the light meter works gives me more confidence to experiment in manual mode now.