by the camera as middle gray. If you point it at a very bright spot in the scene, the image will be underexposed as it tries to correct this reading to a middle gray. The opposite is also true. Meter a very dark spot and it will try to overexpose. You always need to keep this uppermost in your thinking. The meter will always expose for middle gray. Once you become comfortable with this concept, you can begin to use it creatively.
In today's image of my dog, Tucker, I metered off a very bright patch of sunlight that was shining on the floor of my living room. That spot isn't even in the picture, but I wanted to see what a severely underexposed image would look like.
I was using a EF100mm f/2.8 prime (macro) lens set at a fairly wide aperature of f/4.5. The ISO was also set at 1600 because, despite the very bright spot of sunlight on the floor, the room was reasonably dim. In most cases I shoot in aperature priority mode. I like to control depth of field which this allows, and let the shutter speed fall where it may. Shutter speed in this case was 1/8000 sec., the extreme upper limit of the camera.
The result of metering the very bright spot and not compensating for the reading was an "underexposed" image. But, is it really underexposed? It is exactly the look I was going for. I wondered what the image would look like if all you could see were the highlights on the dog.
There are a couple of other things I would like to mention about this photo. First, for a more engaging photo, get down to the subjects level, in this case the floor. And secondly, how underexposed is this photo? If I had exposed this image normally, you would have seen a perfectly white couch in the background!
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