5 Metering & Exposure Tips Every Nikon User Needs To Know

[Music] hey everyone steve from backcountry gallery here in this time i want to share five cool nikon metering and exposure tips that every nikon shooter should know and as always if you enjoy this content remember to like and subscribe let's jump right in one your spot meter is bigger than you think it is as you probably know nikon links the spot meter to the af points this has led many photographers to believe that the spot meter and the af point are roughly the same size and they really aren't here's an af point in a typical full frame view finder and now here's the spot metering area like i say it's a lot larger than most people realize for dx shooters the spot meter is even a little larger relative to the frame as shown here the upshot is that you want to make sure that you're really metering what you think you are if you're metering too small of an area the spot meter will see more than you want and it may give you an incorrect exposure in this image the spot meter would not just see the bird's head but also the darker background as well likely resulting in an over exposure so you got to be careful number two turn auto iso on and off instantly to use auto iso you want a quick way to engage and disengage it just press the iso button and rotate the front command dial to toggle it on and off so much faster than digging in a menu and i use this trick all the time to toggle between full manual mode and auto iso and let me tell you it's a life saver in the field watch your iso sensitivity setting in auto iso speaking of auto iso another pitfall is setting your normal iso too high while most people worry about the max iso setting you need to pay equal attention to your regular iso sensitivity value if you're using auto iso i generally recommend setting your normal iso sensitivity to your camera's base iso that's the first value before you get to the low numbers the reason for this is that if you're not at base iso the camera won't drop below the iso value you set until whatever exposure controls the cameras in charge of are maxed out for example if you were to set your iso sensitivity to iso 3200 and we're using auto iso with maybe aperture priority the camera would have to max out your shutter speed say 1 8 000 of a second before it would drop below that iso 3200 you have set for the iso sensitivity value most of the time that is not what we want the easiest way to set this is by pressing the iso button and rotating the rear command dial this is the same as the iso sensitivity value on the auto iso menu just drop to base iso it's usually like 64 or 100 and the camera won't get stuck shooting at those higher iso values when it doesn't need to number four upgrade auto exposure lock if you use ae lock you'll really like this upgrade the normal way to use ae lock is to press and hold the assign ae lock button right well if you dive into the custom settings menu of a current generation mid-range or pro nikon dslr and look at your controls option you'll find you can assign an item called ae lock hold to your buttons give that a try to use it just press the assign button once and let go the camera will lock in your exposure settings and keep them locked in until one of three things happen now the first thing that can happen is the standby timer runs out basically that's when the meter shuts off and by the way if you find the meter shuts off too quickly you can change that by adjusting the standby timer setting in the custom setting menu the other two ways you can turn the exposure lock off and go back to normal shooting is to turn the camera off or just press the assign button again otherwise the camera will hang on to the locked in exposure and you can fire away without giving it another thought give it a try it's much better than continuously holding down a button to keep exposure locked five matrix metering and af area size you're probably familiar with nikon's matrix metering but most people don't know that the system takes af point position into account when determining a meter reading and and this is the big one the smaller the af area is the more influence the area directly under it has on the final metering decision so if you're using single point af mode matrix metering will give considerable weight to everything in the immediate vicinity of that single af point however switch to an af area mode that covers most of the viewfinder something like d153 for example and the meter gives far less consideration to what's under and around the primary af point look at the difference in exposure between these two scenes the one shot is with single point af and the other is with d153 in my d850 both the single af point and the primary f point of the dynamic group were right on the gray card the only difference between these shots is the size of the af area but it resulted in a two-thirds of a stop difference how much of a difference you get depends on the scene of course the more extreme the difference between the subject and the background the greater the difference in exposure also keep in mind that this scales to other af areas smaller af areas like group af and d9 will get more weight in the metering decision than something like d25 or d72 basically the smaller the af area the more influence it has on the meter the bottom line here is that in many circumstances using a smaller af area can result in more accurate exposures than matrix metering so always go as small as you can not only will you have better control over where the focus is but you'll likely have better metering results too and also just for the record and to avoid any confusion this is not the same as spot metering this is just a little bias that matrix metering uses with smaller af areas by the way if you're shooting nikon mirrorless the camera still takes af position into account when determining exposure but there doesn't seem to be any noticeable correlation between af area size and exposure like we see in the dslrs also make sure you check out my exposure and metering book for nikon for more tips and tricks like these and more info on the tips and tricks you just saw the book is nearly 700 pages and will change the way you use your nikon cameras forever it covers every aspect of nikon's metering and exposure system as well as sharing everything i know about exposure in general make sure you check it out also if you haven't signed up for our new forums what are you waiting for i gotta tell you the members there are really helping people every day and their answers are incredibly insightful especially if you happen to be a wildlife photographer honestly if you're not on the forums you're just really missing out finally you'd be my hero if you liked subscribed and got notified thanks so much for watching have a great day you

Channel: Steve Perry

Views: 85,387

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Keywords: photography tips, photography help, Backcountry Gallery, Steve Perry, nature photography, Nikon meterting tips, Nikon exposure tips, Nikon spot metering, Nikon matrix meterting, Nikon metering help, Nikon exposure help, Nikon metering techniques, Nikon auto iso, Nikon ae-l, Nikon metering advice, Nikon meterting instructions, Nikon meterting tricks, Nikon exposure tricks, Nikon spot meter size

Id: 9dd46ryddQ8

Length: 7min 11sec (431 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 08 2020