Combining Bracketed Exposures vs. Spot Metering

[Scott W.]

Hello,

Pure novice question here.

Is there any big advantage these days to using spot metering rather than simply combining bracketed exposures?

If so, would one recommend a handheld spot meter vs. those in the camera?

Thanks in advance,

Scott

[scottbergerphoto]

Hello,

Pure novice question here.

Is there any big advantage these days to using spot metering rather than simply combining bracketed exposures?

If so, would one recommend a handheld spot meter vs. those in the camera?

Thanks in advance,

Scott
Nothing replaces getting the exposure right in a single frame. That is always the first choice unless you are dealing with a situation with too much dynamic range for the sensor and you need to combine two exposures, one for the highlights and one for the lowlights(shadows).
You can use your camera spotmeter if it has one, a long zoom lens with a non spot metererd camera(so the area you want to meter fills the viewfinder) in Manual Mode to lock in a reading and then change lenses, or a hand held 1 degree spot meter meter. I use the camera spotmeter most of the time or a Sekonic L550.
Regards,
Scott

[DaveG]

Hello,

Pure novice question here.

Is there any big advantage these days to using spot metering rather than simply combining bracketed exposures?

If so, would one recommend a handheld spot meter vs. those in the camera?

Thanks in advance,

Scott

If you use a spot meter you'll get ONE exposure. With the spot meter you've decided which particular "spot" is going to be 18% grey in that one exposure. And that's all it does.

The problem comes if the exposure range latitude of the scene is extended. For example if you pick someone's face to spotmeter then you almost certainly will get the correct exposure of their face. But what happens if his face is shaded by a ball cap and everything else in the shot is lit with bright sunlight? There is just no way a digital camera is going to handle the overexposure that will occur if you expose for the shadow.

With black and white film you had a control over the media that you don't have with digital capture and that's film development. In that contrasty scene described above you could estimate the contrast range (i.e. "It's very contrasty.") and reduce the development time, which lowers contrast. This is a very general description of a "soft" Zone system which produced remarkable results if it was used well.

A spot meter when used with a 4x5 camera was a very useful tool since you could empirically get a readout of the scene's range. And (once again) since film put the photographer in the prediction game it was the best they could do. This specialized development only worked if you could custom process each image which wouldn't work with roll film unless EVERY shot was exposed the same way.

The latitude of a digital capture is very narrow compared to black & white, or colour negative film. It's very similar to colour transparency (slide) film in it's narrow latitude and NO forgiveness for overexposure. So while a spot meter may give you a technically correct reading for that "spot", in that contrasty situation it will not give you that give you a workable capture exposure. It's not the meter's fault, it's the capture's, and the spot meter just isn't the tool for the job.

With a bracketed exposure (assuming that the subject doesn't move) you can expose in one shot for the highlights, and one shot can be for the shadow detail. Then you can use a little Photoshop and dig a really good image out of the whole proposition.

So bracketing will give you a new tool to work with. A spot meter will just give you an opinion that's really no better than the camera's meter, and a darn bunch LESS accurate than the histogram.