How to spot meter: an easy guide to measuring precise exposures

Knowing when to switch to spot metering can give you a big advantage when shooting in difficult lighting conditions. In this tutorial we’ll show you how to spot meter in these situations to achieve the most precise exposures possible.

Much of the time your digital camera’s auto-exposure system will do a perfectly good job. Your Evaluative metering mode breaks the scene down into different zones, analyses the light in each and tries to make a prediction about the subject and the lighting conditions.

However, it can get it wrong. This can happen where the camera doesn’t quite interpret the scene correctly or you’re photographing an intrinsically dark or light-toned subject. You can fix this by applying a little EV (exposure) compensation and retaking the shot.

SEE MORE: 10 common exposure problems every photographer faces (and how to fix them)

There are other situations, though, where there’s more than one ‘correct’ exposure, depending on how you, the photographer, want the shot to look.

Here’s the perfect example. We’re shooting a portrait in a dark tunnel with a bright background, and we’re going for two completely different effects: a light and airy high-key portrait where the background is blown out, and a dark and moody low-key shot where we only see our subject as a profile in silhouette.

The camera can’t possibly know what style of shot we want. Left to its own devices, our camera will try to work out some kind of compromise exposure where there’s a bit of detail in both the subject and the background, but the difference in light levels is so great that it’s never going to work very well.

Let’s see what happens if we use spot metering instead. In this mode, you can take a meter reading from any area of the scene and use this as the basis of the exposure.

By choosing two different areas of the picture we can produce two very different effects, as you can see in our images at the top of this page.