Nikon D7000 manual Spot Metering

Chapter 4 ■ Getting the Right Exposure 109

suggests, the light reading is weighted towards the central portion, but information is also used from the rest of the frame. If your main subject is surrounded by very bright or very dark areas, the exposure might not be exactly right. However, this scheme works well in many situations if you don’t want to use one of the other modes. This mode can be useful for close-ups of subjects like flowers, or for portraits. You can adjust the size of the center area assigned the greatest weight using CSM #b4, as described in Chapter

9.The available circles include 6mm, 8mm, 10mm, 13mm, and “Average” (which in effect, covers the entire screen to produce what is called Average metering).

Spot Metering

Spot metering is favored by those of us who used a hand-held light meter to measure exposure at various points (such as metering highlights and shadows separately). However, you can use Spot metering in any situation where you want to individually measure the light reflecting from light, midtone, or dark areas of your subject—or any combination of areas.

This mode confines the reading to a limited 3.5mm area in the viewfinder, making up only 2.5 percent of the image, as shown in Figure 4.11. The circle is centered on the current focus point (which can be any of the 39 focus points, not just the center one shown in Figure 4.11), but is larger than the focus point, so don’t fall into the trap of believing that exposure is being measured only within the brackets that represent the active focus point. This is the only metering method you can use to tell the D7000

Figure 4.11

Spot metering calculates expo- sure based on a center spot that’s only two

2.5percent of the image area, centered around the current focus point.