Metering Custom Settings

Delve a little deeper into the features you might not know about that affect the metering setup for your camera

There are various settings in your camera relating to metering. Depending on your camera model you might not have all these features and some older cameras might have different features and terminology. Metering and exposure go hand in hand, so it’s important to set up your camera to give maximum control over both. To explore these settings go to the Custom Settings menu and navigate to ‘b Metering/exposure’

B1 EV STEPS FOR EXPOSURE CONTROL

This sets the increments used for shutter speed, aperture, ISO sensitivity, bracketing and exposure and flash compensation. Your options are for 1/3 Step, which gives you finer control over the exposure, the downside is it can take longer to select the exact settings you require. The other option is 1/2 Step, which is faster to use but gives you less refined control over your exposure.

B2 EASY EXPOSURE COMPENSATION

Allows you to choose whether the camera’s Exposure Compensation button is needed for activating exposure compensation. You have three settings to choose from: On (Auto Reset) If you use exposure compensation a lot, and keep forgetting to reset it to zero after you’ve used it, this can be very helpful. In Aperture Priority mode, you use the rear dial to control exposure compensation. In Shutter Priority and Program mode you use the front command dial. On cameras with only a rear command dial, use this to control the exposure compensation settings. Exposure compensation is reset to zero when the camera is turned off or the standby timer expires. [On] Exposure compensation is adjusted via the command dial(s) in the same way as above, but does not reset automatically. [Off] The default setting for the camera. Exposure compensation is set by pressing the ‘+/-’ Exposure Compensation button and, at the same time, rotating the rear command dial to add either positive or negative compensation to the image

B3 CENTREWEIGHTED AREA

If you use Centre-weighted metering, you can adjust the size of the area that the camera uses when metering and subsequently the amount of light in the centre of the frame that will be taken into consideration for the exposure calculations.

B4 FINE-TUNE OPTIMAL EXPOSURE

This is very advanced and it’s highly unlikely that you would need to change the values, but if you know what you are doing you can effectively create a custom metering setup specific to your exact requirements. This menu feature allows you to fine-tune the exposure value calculated for each metering mode. The exposure values can be adjusted up (positive) for brighter exposures and down (negative) for darker exposures in the range +1 to -1 EV in increments of 1/6 EV. The default setting is 0.