Eskimo North

My Canon C2 IS has three exposure protocols: Evaluative, Center weighted, and Spot. I had been using the evaluative as a default but was disappointed occasionally by having overexposed pictures from time to time.

So I tried out taking three shots of various scenes using each type. The center weighted won out for most of them, but there were times when the evaluative type was better. The problem was that I was unable to formulate rules of thumb for use in the future. It would seem as though one was sometimes better than the other for the same situation in a random order.

I did figure out Spot exposure so that's taken care of, but has anyone got any kind of "go by" they use for selecting between Evaluative and Center Weighted?

Chuck

I don't currently have a camera that gives me the exposure options. What I find helps more than which automatic exposure setting is to really pay attention to the lighting. How strong is the light. What direction is is coming from. Is it direct or diffuse. How many shadows or light spots are in the scene.

Sometimes the manual will show you where in your view the camera is checking under the different settings. Under any setting it is possible that a particularly bright spot or dark spot that happens to get hit is going to affect the exposure of the whole shot.

One thing that really helped me (being a geezer) was having a camera at one time where I only had manual exposure capabilites and having to judge every scene and decide what the best exposure was for the circumstance.

Thanks. Although I was asking for "rules" I anticipated that there might not be any. I have your reply, and another source which invites that conclusion. As so often happens, shortly after I posted I tried another go at Googling an answer, and did come up with one about a similar model of Canon: http://creativekarma.com/ee.php/weblog/ ... _rebel_xt/

This is a long and detailed discussion which, to me, wound up as "there really aren't any rules to use in actual practice. This article is more like an explanation than a prescription.

I'll just plan on being more observant of the display and when in doubt, taking one shot with each.

All best wishes,
Chuck

I do a lot of different types of photography and I have found that which mode I use does depend upon the subject and conditions and for some none of the provided modes suffice and I go 100% manual. Particularly, I enjoy night photography but none of Canon's exposure modes deal with the extremely high contrast present at night. Any one of them will overexpose the highlights resulting in bad bleeding and saturation.

I've got a Powershot S2 IS, just a digicam, not as high end, but it does have both auto-exposure and auto-focus bracketing. Memory is cheap these days so unless yo don't have time for multiple exposures, I suggest using these and then pick the best of the shots that result.

I have found that evaluative does tend to overexpose more often than not so when I use that I also use exposure compensation and generally set it to underexpose between a third and two f-stops depending upon the contrast of the subject (more for higher contrast subjects).