What the heck happened here? Help.

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I don't understand. You take a photo and notice it is overexposed. Wouldn't one then adjust so it isn't overexposing ? in this case by, say, dropping the ISO to 200 ? Also--if you're shooting in raw especially, there is a lot of latitude--you can usually overexpose by 1.5 stops and bring it back to looking fab by processing.Were the photos even more blown out and you brought them down by editing ?

+1 on the above. Also, with overcast days, cloud variations from one shot to the next can cause exposure variations

Did you meter the shot before focusing? The Spot Focus will take a reading from a circle in the centre off the frame which is currently her right shoulder.

If you are shooting in Av you can use Exposure Compensation to control this and as the others said if shot in raw there is a lot of latitude to bring the exposure back down.

+1 on the above. Spot will fix.

Only the 1D-series have spotmeter linked to the active AF-point,

Most other canon's will use a zone around the active point.

https://photography-on-the.net/forum/showthre​ad.php?t=797306

The face is close to 3 stops overexposed, some are salvageable in the RAW processor, others, not so much. 1 stop is workable, even close to 2, but alot of the information just isn't there. Even metering off of the coat, the error seems way out of proportion. I attempted offsetting the exposure (EC) and it just blacked out portions and made them unsalvageable in the other direction. I dunno what the moral is here? Is it that I'm working with light skin and a dark cloth and I'm just going to have to use a different metering mode and/or a gray card?

I was having issues last week too and corrected it by leaving the EC at -1. It didn't make sense to me at the time as to why this was necessary, and I did attempt to lock a neutral exposure in before recomposing the shot I wanted. After an hour or so of shooting in various locations I had to go back to EC 0.

Here I was using the upper right AF point iirc.


This is the face "correctly" exposed. In reality it is underexposed by ~2 stops:

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Try a hand held incident meter?

And as mentioned above, is the metering linked to the active AF point on the 5DII? It isn't on the 7D.

Is the jacked black or gray?
"This is the face "correctly" exposed. In reality it is underexposed by ~2 stops:" So by this statement the photograph is -2 in order to get the face correct? that photo looks too dark to me.
Your meter is trying to make everything 18% gray so it is up to the photographer to understand the subject or as Dave says, get an incident meter.
Some newer cameras have a database of typical scenes and attempt to make a better decision but some reflected light scenes are difficult.

ChunkyDA wrote in post #13300716
Is the jacked black or gray?
"This is the face "correctly" exposed. In reality it is underexposed by ~2 stops:" So by this statement the photograph is -2 in order to get the face correct? that photo looks too dark to me.
Your meter is trying to make everything 18% gray so it is up to the photographer to understand the subject or as Dave says, get an incident meter.
Some newer cameras have a database of typical scenes and attempt to make a better decision but some reflected light scenes are difficult.

Jacket is dark blue.

I meant that in the sense that if I push it up +2 in PP the face seems correct to me where I believe that I made a point to meter off of the face in that shot, meaning the camera's "correct" is -2 or more.

The fix seems to be the overexposure dance, turn in a 360 degree circle, hit the camera, have a cup of coffee and slap the model on the butt. To me it seems like the issue comes and goes without predictability or regularity.

I thought that maybe I had messed up a setting on the new camera, now I suppose I'll just have to be more vigilant about what its metering off of...

were you using a flash?

DreDaze wrote in post #13301249
were you using a flash?

No.