For Photographers: Shooting and metering modes
In this first For Photographers post, I’m going to jump right in and discuss how we operate our cameras when shooting weddings and boudoir.
We shoot with Canon 1Ds mk3 and 5D mk2 full-frame cameras. We shoot everything in RAW, so our captures are 21+MP digital files – or negatives is a good way to consider them. The real advantage of these settings is having the megapixels to crop our images in post and still have wonderful image quality – especially for creating panos from a standard 35mm capture!
I’ll talk about our digital workflows and image post-processing in later posts.
Maria and I have been shooting film for over 20 years, and digital for the last five. I’ve just started shooting medium format film again with a Mamiya RZ67. There’s definitely a post coming on using film in this digital era!
Anyway, whether film or digital, we use the same shooting and metering modes: Aperture Priority (Av) and Manual (M). Once in a blue moon (almost literally!) we might switch to Bulb (B) for a very low night scene. We never use Program modes (or P for Professional as the joke goes…), and never had a use for Shutter Priority. (If we want motion, we can create it in Manual mode, or freeze it with flash if necessary.)
Our preferred shooting mode is Manual. For digital, we typically use full evaluative metering (looks at the whole sensor area and computes an exposure value based on weighting of different areas), and this is typically fine for straightforward lighting situations. When subjects are backlit, or in more interesting lighting, we use spot metering.
When shooting film I always use manual mode with spot metering, and consider tone placement. (New digital shooters are recommended to read up on Ansel Adams’ zone system, even though the exposure mindset is different for digital.) There’s simply no other way to go when you don’t have an LCD and Histogram for feedback (or a polaroid!), and you want to nail those exposures. – and yes, I have light and flash meters that I use with film too!
Aperture priority (Av) can be better for faster-paced ‘run and gunning’ during a wedding, but we always use this mode in conjunction with considered exposure compensation. With the Canon’s, I find I’m often adding +1/3 stop to most captures, but it comes down to a sense and familiarity with the camera’s metering. What I’m saying is that we hardly ever go with the exposure indicated by the camera – we’re ‘riding the compensation dial’ as we’re shooting, to get the hottest capture we can.
What are we trying to achieve with a digital capture?
Simply stated, we’re trying to get the hottest capture at the lowest ISO, with the desired creative aperture. ISO capability in modern DSLRs is simply astounding, but noise is always lurking in those dark areas, so we use the lowest ISO (typically ISO 200 and Canon’s highlight tone priority) for best quality. That said, we usually have to move up to 1600 or 3200 ISO for those indoor candids…
Overall, our strategy is to ‘expose to the right’, without over-exposing, and avoiding those LCD blinkies. Then, in our post-processing, we simply nudge the histogram left (darker) to taste – and along the way, we got a lot less noise than if we’d just captured the image ‘right in camera’ – or maybe using the LCD image as our judge, rather than experience with the camera’s meters and histograms.
There’s an excellent article on this over at Luminous Landscape – a true photography and printing gold mine.
Finally, we use no in-camera picture styles – all are set to neutral, including sharpening. In fact we only sharpen images for creative purposes and on the way out to print or screen. We believe all this gives us the absolute best quality image files out of the equipment we use, and we keep those files golden throughout the whole of post-production.
We hope the information and links shared in these articles is useful. We love our craft and see only benefit in sharing knowledge. Until next time…
