Evaluative & Multi-Spot Metering

I tried my hand the other day while sitting at the marina at spot metering and wanted to know a few things regarding metering differences.

Is there a technique to multi-spot metering? I tried it and this was the difference.

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Evaluative takes the whole scene into consideration and recommends an exposure for the entire frame to make a medium gray valued exposure. Spot metering does the same, but only for the spot you metered on. The camera doesn't "store" the spots and average them or anything like that.

I'm guessing you used the exposure recommended for #3 when you took the shot, correct?

Oh is that how spot works. I thought it averaged the 3 spots and set the exposure. I don't think I even touched it after the third spot, just fired the shutter. How dumb am I.

Thanks for that information Mike, I will go back to my manual and re read.

Absolutely not to worry, Shasta... I thought it was something similar to that, too, until I was reading up on some stuff on the internet the other day. I haven't had a chance to apply what I've read yet, but hopefully in the next couple days...

Best of luck with the pics!

As with all things, what the cam thinks is the "correct" exposure isn't (usually) the right exposure? Too many factors come into it to let some programming geek at Canon try to figure it out for me. So I usually shoot on "M", meter for the important highlights & let RAW take care of the shadows.
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Cameras which are DESIGNED to support multispot average, can do what you want. Olympus OM-4 was the first camera to offer multispot, and you could even tell the meter that a specific spot represented a highlight or a shadow area and it would compensate! Today, I believe that the top end Canons (1DsII) support multispot.

In your example, the spot metered result is underexposed compared to the evaluative mode. That suprises me, if #3 was the last spot sampled...as that is a relatively low reflectance portion of the scene, I would have expected it to result in overexpose slightly, not slight underexposure! It seems like the sky (labelled #2) was actually the last point metered, as it is close to 18% grey.

I may very well could have mixed up the order of the selection. I do find when in manual mode and Eval metering compensating at +1/3 gives my pictures a better dynamic range. Canon 1D.

Your 1D does indeed have multispot capability! I suggest you refer to the Owner's Manual to make sure you know how that feature is accessed.

Averaging two bright (sky, reflection on water) and one darkish (the dock float) could still result in underexposure of the scene, even if you did use multispot correctly in terms of the mechanical access to the feature.

I apologize, Shasta... I gave you bad info!!