New 5D....need help with exposure question

Thanks to all....I will keep working on it. The forum is a great help.

With the meter set to evaluative and in either Tv or Av see what it sets shutter speed and aperture to for given scene. Now switch to spot metering in full manual mode set the same shutter speed and aperture. You can now compare what was selected automatically to the exposure meter reading as you pan around the scene with your camera. Hope this makes as much sense on paper as it does in my head

I agree with Skip. You would benefit greatly from reading "Understanding Exposure" by Bryan Peterson.

I tend to leave my WB on 'Cloudy" on my 5D. I like the warmer tones that this provides. That all being said, careful attention to the WB setting will probably deal with most of the color cast issues.

Try shooting with RAW and then adjusting this in post processing to see how that works for you. You'll get a better idea of what white balance does for you.

Also, avoid shooting in Auto - the camera is making all the decisions and it will not always make the right ones (in point of fact, most probably won't).

J.

SkipD wrote in post #2301146
The slight color shift can be corrected by judicious use of White Balance settings.

The exposure problems appear to me to be caused by the method of metering and the fact that the two scenes are somewhat tricky to meter.

The first shot has a very bright center and a rather dark surround. Using the metering in fully automatic "pattern" mode, the camera could easily have mistaken the dark background as being something you were really interested in. The second shot is similar in that the face is bright but the rest is not.

Shots like these demand CONTROL of the exposure measuring method because the camera (and its generic programming) cannot possibly know what you want in any particular situation. To do shots like these, I would use a handheld incident meter to measure the light falling on the subject. To use the camera's reflected light meter to do the same thing, you could read a standard 18% gray card to get the exposure settings. Locking the exposure settings into "M" (manual) mode makes a lot of sense in this kind of situation. Then, because you have determined and locked in the exposure settings, all you need to concentrate on is focusing and framing.

I agree Skip, but you sure love to pimp the incident meter!

Why not just spot meter for the brightest part of the scene and dial in the appropriate level of EC?

I tend to avoid using matrix metering (or whatever it's called) in contrasty shots.

AdamJL wrote in post #2306807
Why not just spot meter for the brightest part of the scene and dial in the appropriate level of EC?

Why not? I wouldn't do that because I am also interested in the shadowed areas. Were I to use a spot meter, I would measure the brightest and the darkest areas of interest in the scene and calculate the difference. If the difference were no more than 5 or six stops, I would set the camera for the mid-range value between the extremes. If the difference between the extremes was greater than 6 stops, I would set the camera to favor the extreme of most interest.

Automated exposure control - as well as using a handheld meter in the reflected mode and merely grabbing a single reading from the scene - does not provide me with enough control to KNOW that my exposure will be adequate. By using the tools that are available to me, I seldom have an exposure that isn't quite close to optimum.

I've always had a penchant for accuracy (in anything I do) and learned photography with manually operated tools. I just continue to work in much the same way, even with the modern cameras. My results, however, are as good as they always were.