Quick Photo Tip: Metering

Here's a quick tip that can help get better photos more often when using a digital camera, especially a point-and-shoot.
To use this tip, you will need to switch to a mode other than the green square. The green square is the full auto mode and it locks out most, if not all of the settings. The easiest mode to switch to is P (Program). This will unlock a lot of settings while still letting you shoot with settings made automatically.
The setting you'll want to change is the Metering setting. There will be another blog entry that explains what metering is (or you can Google/Bing it). We want to change the Metering setting to 'Spot' (or 'Partial' if your camera doesn't have Spot Metering).
Once you've switched this, point the camera at what you want to take a picture of, keeping the main focus of the shot in the middle of the frame. For example, if you were taking a photo of a friend, put their face in the middle of the frame. There may even be a square that shows up in the viewfinder to show you where the camera is metering. Then, half-press the shutter button to get focus. Keeping the button half-pressed, you can recompose the shot and fully press the button to take the shot.
This works even better when you change the focus point to just the center focus point. With both Spot/Partial Metering and center focus on, you're essentially telling the camera what you want to take a photo of, rather than hoping it figures it out itself. Truly point-and-shoot rather than point-and-pray.

Happy Clicking!


* One exercise you can try with this is simply focusing on different parts of a scene you want to take a photo of and see how it changes the picture you get as a result.