Meter like a Master

Chris Rutter explores how and when to use your Nikon’s different metering options

Explore your Nikon’s metering modes, and discover when to use each one

Your Nikon D-SLR is designed to read light levels in a scene and calculate the exposure settings required – in other words, metering. And every Nikon D-SLR has a choice of metering systems available, because sometimes you want to consider a whole scene and at other times you only want to take the light in part of it into account. Along with Nikon’s default 3D matrix metering, which can be thought of as ‘average’ metering, there are two other main metering modes, ‘centre-weighted’ and ‘spot’. Both can help you get more accurate exposures in different lighting situations. These three modes differ in the areas they cover and the way that they measure the light across the image. Allow us to explain…