The Evolution of Camera Metering and Shooting Modes

Modern cameras have come a long way since simple center-weighted metering, which was once used by Canon, Nikon, Pentax, and other major camera manufacturers. In today's era of advanced technology, cameras offer various modes to cater to different shooting needs. This article will delve into the different modes available on modern cameras, including their functions and uses.

The Standard Modes

One of the standard modes found in most Canon cameras is a series of icons or pictures representing specific situations, such as a chick in the mountain and a flower. These modes are designed to help users capture the best possible image under various conditions. By selecting one of these modes, users can simply push the button and let the camera do the math for them. However, if users want more control over their shots, they can switch to semi-automatic modes.

Semi-Automatic Modes

The semi-automatic modes on modern cameras offer a balance between user input and automated adjustments. The first mode is Depth of Field, which focuses on achieving a specific depth of field in the image. This mode takes into account both aperture and shutter speed to ensure that the desired effect is achieved. Another mode is Aperture Priority, where the camera adjusts the aperture based on the user's selection. This mode allows users to control the amount of depth in focus while adjusting the aperture.

Manual Mode

The Manual mode is ideal for users who want complete control over their shots. In this mode, users can set both aperture and shutter speed using a handheld meter or by referencing their camera manual. By jogging the shutter wheel, users can adjust the aperture, which is then linked to the shutter speed through the use of buttons on the back of the camera.

A/V/T/P Modes

The A/V/T/P modes are used for specific shooting situations. A (Aperture Priority) mode allows users to set the aperture value, and the camera adjusts the shutter speed accordingly. The V (Video) mode is used for recording video, while T (Time Value) mode is used for capturing images with a specific shutter speed. P (Program) mode is used for general photography, where the camera automatically adjusts both aperture and shutter speed to achieve the best possible exposure.

The P Mode in Detail

The P mode on modern cameras is often considered the most user-friendly option. When in P mode, users can simply hold down the shutter halfway down, compose their shot, and let the camera do its job. The camera will then mix together a combination of aperture and shutter speed to achieve the best possible exposure for the image. However, if users want more control over their shots, they can adjust the jogwheel to make adjustments to both aperture and shutter speed.

Tips and Tricks

When using these modes, it's essential to understand that modern cameras are designed to be retentive of perfect exposures. This means that achieving a correct exposure is not as straightforward as it was with older cameras. The A/V/T/P modes offer a lot of flexibility, but users need to adjust to the new way of thinking.

For example, in Aperture Priority mode, the camera increases aperture values in thirds of a stop, rather than one-stop increments like older cameras. This can be confusing for beginner students who are used to seeing logic that relates to exposure. Additionally, the T mode is designed to capture images with specific shutter speeds, such as 125th of a second for motion shots.

Conclusion

In conclusion, modern cameras offer a range of modes and functions that cater to different shooting needs. Understanding how to use these modes can help users achieve better results in their photography. By familiarizing themselves with the A/V/T/P modes and tips on using them effectively, photographers can unlock new possibilities in their creative endeavors.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enjoin us now on Flickr at flickr.com slash groups slash art of photography welcome to the art of photography I'm Ted Forbes again and today we're going to talk about metering with your camera okay now last time we talked about metering with a handheld light meter and we'll go into more pockets I think it's the wonderful thing that I can do with this podcast is kind of build on previous material so don't worry if you're still have some questions on something feel free to come on Flickr and ask or just kind of hang out because we're going to cover things kind of over and over in more detail and some of these podcasts but today we're going to talk about how to meter using your camera okay now in this first example I've intentionally picked an old camera because the evolution of camera meeting metering has come quite a ways in the last twenty years thirty years or so this particular model is a Nikon f3 it's a wonderful film camera very simple very easy to use and this was the Nikon camera that all the pros used for years these were designed in the early 80s this was really kind of a in terms of popularity a very benchmark camera for Canon are sleeping the for Nikon well Nikon would not appreciate me blundering there but anyway and it's very easy how to use this camera on these older lenses and this has been removed on a lot of the newer digital cameras because in the digital stuff most everything is self-contained inside the camera and you simply use the shutter wheel and things like that to to change your settings but on these older cameras there's a lot more manual stuff going on and up here on the top will show you have the aperture ring around the lens and you can see that it has a series of stops that are marked off on this aperture ring okay so 2.5 is wide open on this particular lens and as I back this off I got four or five six eight 11 16 22 so it goes up in increments of one stop now I can actually kind of put this halfway between the two and you can get half stops that's certainly attained achievable the camera will work doing that so if you have to stop a light I don't know either in the darkroom or in Photoshop that's pretty easily to manipulate without losing too much data so I don't worry too much about half stops ever anyway and then on the top of the camera over here you also have the this wheel will adjust the shutter speed okay so you have remember this doubles with your light so you have roughly so you have 8 15 30 60 125 250 500 etc these are faster shutter speeds I have this set right now to the letter A which means automatic okay now this camera featured what was known as aperture priority metering okay which basically means what I'm going to do is I've set that to automatic that means it's going to meter through the lens and whatever aperture I have this set at it's going to do the calculations to come up with the correct shutter speed okay and when you actually look through the lens it tells you gives you a preview when you when you have hold down the button that tells you what shutter speed it's going to give you so you know if it's too slow to handhold or if you need a tripod something like that or if it's too slow and I don't care too much about my depth of field I can simply open the the diaphragm and increase my aperture size but anyway that's basically how it is it's a point-and-shoot but you select your aperture and it figures out the shutter speed okay so that was pretty early metering this is also technique of what's known as center-weighted metering which basically it takes the scene that you're photographing through the lens and it has the center circle that it's kind of looking at and it's like I can't really remember the I think this is either 30 70 or 80 20 it's a percentage of of what they figure your subject will probably be in the middle of the shot so it's waiting waiting the metering towards the middle and comes up with an average for your exposure there is a great camera and I actually really prefer to meter this way it also has an exposure lock on it and so I can I can get an exposure if I know that that my shot needs to be exposed slightly different I can expose a different part of the scene hold down the exposure lock and it will not change when I go back to the other part of the scene so that's one way of handling that I guess that's an older camera let's bump up quite a few years into the digital age here and I'm gonna show you this Canon that I've got and this Canon specifically is kind of outdated at this point I use this for illustrating examples here but more or less you can see that metering has come a little little ways since since the old aperture priority only obviously if you have aperture priority would make sense that some people there in certain suiting situations you would want to have shutter priority okay where you're actually picking the shutter speed and it's doing the math to figure out the aperture it's related now I will say that the the metering systems on these modern cameras have come a long way since just simple center-weighted metering which is what Canon and Nikon Pentax and all the big companies used to do back in the day but anyway this has various set of modes here and this is pretty standard across all Canon cameras you have you know these little icons or pictures of like the chick in the mountain and the flower and all if you want a specific situation and it'll kind of do a lot of the math for you all you have to do is push the button and go but if you go into these semi-automatic modes okay a depth is aperture priority with a depth of field in a way it focuses it's going to bring focus into the equation on that to come up with your aperture because remember aperture also affects what all is in focus in your shot and I'm going to talk about that so much right now M is manual okay and this is if you are using a handheld meter and you want to do your own settings I think when you look through here pretty much you jog the shutter wheel and it will just the aperture then I hold down this button on the back and then it will affect the shutter speed again consult your own camera manual on how to do this on your particular model the next one down I have a V T V and P and I'm going to briefly explain these a V is a aperture priority okay or aperture value and basically when I have hold down the the shutter release and I twist the the shutter jog here basically what it's going to do is it's going I'm going to see the apertures changing okay so I'm gonna see it go from this a 1.8 lens so I'll probably go from 1.8 up to 2.8 and so on so for 2.0 etc this actually this camera is tuned in thirds of the stop and unfortunately this is very handle retentive to people who want the perfect exposure on a digital camera but it's more difficult for beginner students because you're seeing just numbers that really you don't see a logic that relate to whereas the older cameras that increase in one stop increments seem to make more sense but these actually increase in thirds of the stops every three clicks is going to be one stop okay so that's how you would use a V and then what it does is it figures out the aperture value based on your aperture value it figures out the correct shutter speed it will preview that for you so you can see that's too slow too handheld or if you need more light or less light TV stands for time value and this is shutter priority okay so when I flip the jogwheel now what it's going to do is it's going to change the shutter speeds in increments of actually again third of a stop on more modern cameras and I'm able to figure out okay I can't handhold it at at 1:30 because I've had way too much coffee today so I need to at least be getting one sixtieth and if it cannot widen the aperture enough it'll start blinking and tell you that's going to be not exposed correctly but that's basically what that does now P is program shift okay and what this does this is probably the most simple I should have started here but this is the most simple of all modes when I'm in P mode what I do is I simply hold the shutter halfway down compose my subject and it's going to come up with its best guest at the mix between shutter speed and aperture that is going to be usable for your photograph and remember though both those are going to equate into your exposure value which is going to be the correct exposure to give the sensor or film so if if I don't like if I feel like the aperture is too wide something like that I can adjust the the jogwheel and it will also at the same time it will it will lower the aperture raise the aperture and then you know raise or lower the shutter speed to coincide with it to make sure your shutter is correct so this is the program I probably use it the least aperture I probably use the most time occasionally time value comes in or shutter priority comes in when you're shooting like if you want blur in your shot if you're shooting you know I don't know an event where you want motion in place like crowd of people and you want a slight blur and you want a moving feel to it well I know that at 125th of a second that's not going to be slow enough to capture any motion up I need to go down to 30th or 15th and use tripods something like that so anyway so those that's basically how you're going to use these modes in your camera to determine what's your correct combination between shutter or zooming shutter speed and aperture are so anyway that's been the art of photography thanks for watching hope that helpedjoin us now on Flickr at flickr.com slash groups slash art of photography welcome to the art of photography I'm Ted Forbes again and today we're going to talk about metering with your camera okay now last time we talked about metering with a handheld light meter and we'll go into more pockets I think it's the wonderful thing that I can do with this podcast is kind of build on previous material so don't worry if you're still have some questions on something feel free to come on Flickr and ask or just kind of hang out because we're going to cover things kind of over and over in more detail and some of these podcasts but today we're going to talk about how to meter using your camera okay now in this first example I've intentionally picked an old camera because the evolution of camera meeting metering has come quite a ways in the last twenty years thirty years or so this particular model is a Nikon f3 it's a wonderful film camera very simple very easy to use and this was the Nikon camera that all the pros used for years these were designed in the early 80s this was really kind of a in terms of popularity a very benchmark camera for Canon are sleeping the for Nikon well Nikon would not appreciate me blundering there but anyway and it's very easy how to use this camera on these older lenses and this has been removed on a lot of the newer digital cameras because in the digital stuff most everything is self-contained inside the camera and you simply use the shutter wheel and things like that to to change your settings but on these older cameras there's a lot more manual stuff going on and up here on the top will show you have the aperture ring around the lens and you can see that it has a series of stops that are marked off on this aperture ring okay so 2.5 is wide open on this particular lens and as I back this off I got four or five six eight 11 16 22 so it goes up in increments of one stop now I can actually kind of put this halfway between the two and you can get half stops that's certainly attained achievable the camera will work doing that so if you have to stop a light I don't know either in the darkroom or in Photoshop that's pretty easily to manipulate without losing too much data so I don't worry too much about half stops ever anyway and then on the top of the camera over here you also have the this wheel will adjust the shutter speed okay so you have remember this doubles with your light so you have roughly so you have 8 15 30 60 125 250 500 etc these are faster shutter speeds I have this set right now to the letter A which means automatic okay now this camera featured what was known as aperture priority metering okay which basically means what I'm going to do is I've set that to automatic that means it's going to meter through the lens and whatever aperture I have this set at it's going to do the calculations to come up with the correct shutter speed okay and when you actually look through the lens it tells you gives you a preview when you when you have hold down the button that tells you what shutter speed it's going to give you so you know if it's too slow to handhold or if you need a tripod something like that or if it's too slow and I don't care too much about my depth of field I can simply open the the diaphragm and increase my aperture size but anyway that's basically how it is it's a point-and-shoot but you select your aperture and it figures out the shutter speed okay so that was pretty early metering this is also technique of what's known as center-weighted metering which basically it takes the scene that you're photographing through the lens and it has the center circle that it's kind of looking at and it's like I can't really remember the I think this is either 30 70 or 80 20 it's a percentage of of what they figure your subject will probably be in the middle of the shot so it's waiting waiting the metering towards the middle and comes up with an average for your exposure there is a great camera and I actually really prefer to meter this way it also has an exposure lock on it and so I can I can get an exposure if I know that that my shot needs to be exposed slightly different I can expose a different part of the scene hold down the exposure lock and it will not change when I go back to the other part of the scene so that's one way of handling that I guess that's an older camera let's bump up quite a few years into the digital age here and I'm gonna show you this Canon that I've got and this Canon specifically is kind of outdated at this point I use this for illustrating examples here but more or less you can see that metering has come a little little ways since since the old aperture priority only obviously if you have aperture priority would make sense that some people there in certain suiting situations you would want to have shutter priority okay where you're actually picking the shutter speed and it's doing the math to figure out the aperture it's related now I will say that the the metering systems on these modern cameras have come a long way since just simple center-weighted metering which is what Canon and Nikon Pentax and all the big companies used to do back in the day but anyway this has various set of modes here and this is pretty standard across all Canon cameras you have you know these little icons or pictures of like the chick in the mountain and the flower and all if you want a specific situation and it'll kind of do a lot of the math for you all you have to do is push the button and go but if you go into these semi-automatic modes okay a depth is aperture priority with a depth of field in a way it focuses it's going to bring focus into the equation on that to come up with your aperture because remember aperture also affects what all is in focus in your shot and I'm going to talk about that so much right now M is manual okay and this is if you are using a handheld meter and you want to do your own settings I think when you look through here pretty much you jog the shutter wheel and it will just the aperture then I hold down this button on the back and then it will affect the shutter speed again consult your own camera manual on how to do this on your particular model the next one down I have a V T V and P and I'm going to briefly explain these a V is a aperture priority okay or aperture value and basically when I have hold down the the shutter release and I twist the the shutter jog here basically what it's going to do is it's going I'm going to see the apertures changing okay so I'm gonna see it go from this a 1.8 lens so I'll probably go from 1.8 up to 2.8 and so on so for 2.0 etc this actually this camera is tuned in thirds of the stop and unfortunately this is very handle retentive to people who want the perfect exposure on a digital camera but it's more difficult for beginner students because you're seeing just numbers that really you don't see a logic that relate to whereas the older cameras that increase in one stop increments seem to make more sense but these actually increase in thirds of the stops every three clicks is going to be one stop okay so that's how you would use a V and then what it does is it figures out the aperture value based on your aperture value it figures out the correct shutter speed it will preview that for you so you can see that's too slow too handheld or if you need more light or less light TV stands for time value and this is shutter priority okay so when I flip the jogwheel now what it's going to do is it's going to change the shutter speeds in increments of actually again third of a stop on more modern cameras and I'm able to figure out okay I can't handhold it at at 1:30 because I've had way too much coffee today so I need to at least be getting one sixtieth and if it cannot widen the aperture enough it'll start blinking and tell you that's going to be not exposed correctly but that's basically what that does now P is program shift okay and what this does this is probably the most simple I should have started here but this is the most simple of all modes when I'm in P mode what I do is I simply hold the shutter halfway down compose my subject and it's going to come up with its best guest at the mix between shutter speed and aperture that is going to be usable for your photograph and remember though both those are going to equate into your exposure value which is going to be the correct exposure to give the sensor or film so if if I don't like if I feel like the aperture is too wide something like that I can adjust the the jogwheel and it will also at the same time it will it will lower the aperture raise the aperture and then you know raise or lower the shutter speed to coincide with it to make sure your shutter is correct so this is the program I probably use it the least aperture I probably use the most time occasionally time value comes in or shutter priority comes in when you're shooting like if you want blur in your shot if you're shooting you know I don't know an event where you want motion in place like crowd of people and you want a slight blur and you want a moving feel to it well I know that at 125th of a second that's not going to be slow enough to capture any motion up I need to go down to 30th or 15th and use tripods something like that so anyway so those that's basically how you're going to use these modes in your camera to determine what's your correct combination between shutter or zooming shutter speed and aperture are so anyway that's been the art of photography thanks for watching hope that helped\n"