Why meter off the sky

With respect to the sky, pick a place that looks neutral gray and expose off that. If you what the sky to appear brighter open up a stop, and for darker reduce a stop. You can also bracket. It takes practice to learn to use your light meter as guide to exposure.

Because you have set your camera up for manual operation and have set up your exposure then you can aim your camera any ware and the settings will not change.

If you want the people to be in focus then manually re-focus on the people. Stick with one ISO setting for the entire shoot to reduce the number of variable you need to deal with.

Take an afternoon to play, experiment and practice with exposure. The more you do the better you will get. Focus and exposure are two different things! They both somehow fall onto those pesky red bracketed squares inside the viewfinder and that confuses you, it seems. You can focus on the sky or better the faces and meter the sky or the people, both independently of each other. Try it out! But if you do a group portrait, why not focus AND meter on the people?

The "fixed" image looks between one-half to one stop too bright on my monitor. Kiran, I think the root of your problem is that you're not clear on what you want to do. If you want to photograph the sky, get all those folks out of the scene -- they're distracting attention from the sky!

They do the following:. Side Note: Unfortunately this is quite hard to do if you don't have a manual mode. A cheaper camera will adjust the exposure when you half-depress the shutter which is what we are doing with the above steps but it will also adjust the focus. We don't want the camera to set the focus to the sky because then when we reframe the shot, our subjects will be out of focus. Generally speaking, when you take your picture this way, your sky should be a nice blue.

When might that be? Sunsets and sunrises are a good example. You should usually expose for the colors in your main subject. If your subject is the sky, expose for that. If the subject is a dense thicket of trees shedding their leaves in the fall, expose for the fall colors. On a sunny day, the sky is usually much brighter than everything else in the scene. In order to cool it down, your camera tells you that you need to increase your shutter speed dramatically.

Try it out. Point your camera at the sky on a bright day, and see what the light meter tells you. Crazy talk! When you use shutter speeds this fast, everything in your scene starts to get very dark.

Yes, your sky will be a perfect blue, but your subject will also be a perfect black. It gets even worse when you point your camera at the sun.

Only then will I be fully happy as a photographer! Thank you so much. WOW… wonderful tutorials on this post. The 50MM and the macro lens are amazing Just gotta be able to afford a few more now! I love your blog. A friend of mine told me about it and I am so glad she did. I have a questions.

I am new to shooting in manual. When you talk about stops what does that mean? Are you referring to the meter chart? I have a Nikon D How much does each one of those lines on the meter represent? Your series of photography info is the best I have seen so far. You keep it simple with lots of images to show the differences in the different types of settings. These have really helped me become a better photographer. Keep the tips and info coming! Your saying you underexposed to get the colors more saturated, but why would you overexpose as the sun wheat down?

I just love this website and all the knowledge that is shared. The forested hills in the foreground and dark cloud represent the shadows, the temple roof and figure represent the mid-tones, and the bright clouds represent the highlights. A figure on the roof of a temple looks out across forested hills — Jiufen, Taiwan. Your camera has an ingenious tool called a light meter that enables it to determine a correct exposure with a balance of shadows, mid-tones, and highlights.

Consider the example below. If you were to meter only off the dragon and take the photo, the dragon would be correctly exposed. However, the sky would probably be too bright. Alternatively, if I was to meter only off the sky, the sky would be correctly exposed but the dragon would be a bit too dark. However, if I metered from a wider section of the scene, I would get a more balanced exposure. Metered off the dragon the exposure is a bit too light.

But before we begin, a note about how your camera meter works. Very bright and dark tones can trick your light meter. Or would you want their tones to be rendered as truly as your eye sees them? The answer is obvious, but not to your light meter. So it is your job to review your image on the histogram and decide if it is correct for your scene or not.