If your camera has a matrix meter mode, you should use it most of the
time, since it generally delivers outstanding results under a broad range of conditions.
Spot Meters
The last major kind of light meter is a spot. The spot meter is never the only kind of meter in a
camera; instead, it??™s an option that you can switch to if the center-weighted or matrix meter fails
you. As you can see in Figure 3-9, the spot meter measures light exclusively in one tiny portion
of the screen, ignoring the rest of the frame completely. That can come in handy on occasion, but
a meter that only measures the light in the central 1 percent of the frame will typically take very
poor pictures??”either highly under- or overexposed, depending on the situation.
Many cameras use multiple focus points in the viewfinder and let you specify one of the
focus points as the spot meter location. The advantage? Say you want to take a picture of a
subject that??™s not in the center of the screen. You can lock in focus using one of the alternate
focusing zones and measure the exposure based on that same point as well. Be sure to read your
camera manual to see how this feature works on your camera.
So when should you use the spot meter? Any time you are trying to photograph a scene
in which a small subject must be exposed properly for the picture to work and its lighting is
FIGURE 3-8 Cameras with a multisegment meter are usually more accurate because they
accumulate exposure information from several distinct regions of the frame
(like the five regions shown here) and then use a sophisticated algorithm to
decide the final exposure for the picture.
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