[gd]

Over the past week or so I've read a lot of reviews and stuff saying that the Nikon's D70 metering system is very good at what it does.

In the past, I've just looked at a scene and said "I think this is the shutter speed I need" and let the shutter priority do the rest.

But since I'm moving out of pretend cameras and into the real thing, I've noticed I have relied significantly on the metering system of the camera to tell me about exposure.

So do you basically say "it's this bright I usually do this in this brightness".. or... ..do you use external means to identify how much light is in the scene and then choose your f-stop and shutter appropriately?

And how much do people trust what their camera (which ever brand) says about exposure? Do you use bracketing, lots of test shots etc.

[StudioJ]

For general metering the cameras these days seem to be pretty good, I've noticed the 10D underxposes between 1/3-2/3 of a stop, if you have a fairly evenly lit scene and take a shot with no compensation and then check your histogram you can see how accurate it is (sorta!). Shooting with your histogram rather than relying on what you see on the LCD is pretty important.

Depending on the scene you are shooting the camera should expose fairly well most of the time but it is trying to expose for a mid grey so its not the best, small bright patches such as reflections really play havoc with the readings as does a bright sky.

You can bracket but with digital and general shooting I think its easier to take the shot, review and adjust, it just depends on whether you want to record three copies of the same thing and then sort it out later or not.

[Cailean]

Shooting with your histogram rather than relying on what you see on the LCD is pretty important.

This is something I consistently forget to do... even after I realized that I most shots that look overexposed on the LCD really aren't, it's actually just the viewing angle of LCD which changes the overall brightness of the picture (on the LCD) significantly...

[shuttertalk]

So do you basically say "it's this bright I usually do this in this brightness".. or... ..do you use external means to identify how much light is in the scene and then choose your f-stop and shutter appropriately?

And how much do people trust what their camera (which ever brand) says about exposure? Do you use bracketing, lots of test shots etc.

From time to time I play around with the aperture or shutter speed to achieve a certain effect, but I tend to rely on the camera to calculate the exposure value based on the setting I've selected.

My cam doesn't have a histogram so I rely on a cursory glance at the LCD to tell if things are ok. To make things worse, the post-view image on my cam sometimes doesn't seem to match the actual pic. i.e. the colour in the post-view sometimes seems a bit off, but when I switch to play mode and the camera loads up the actual image, it looks ok. Go figure. :|

[StudioJ]

I had to have a bit of a laugh then ST, I tried to imagine a Colour Spyder attached to the LCD on your camera and it was a funny mental image.

LCD's suck for comparison, histograms however ROCK!

[Toad]

You know that you have been in digital photography too long when you prefer looking at a histogram to a viewfinder...

[Cailean]

We'll end up like those guys in the Matrix movies who 'see' images in the scrambled data... Take a look at a histo and say " '53 Buick with a blond in a bikini on the hood... whitewall tires."

[gd]

man I love that picture... her 1's are some of the best 1's I've seen... her zeros, I wasn't too keen on.. a little under exposed.

[StudioJ]

hehe.. there are 10 types of people, those who understand binary and those who don't.