Spot Metering and Banjo the Dog

I was reading last week on the different metering options on my camera. One of which is spot metering. On the standard evaluative metering mode your pretty much relying on your camera to have a look at all the colours in the photo then make an estimate on shutter speed. with spot metering your picking a single colour then telling the camera to expose that colour perfeclty  then let everything else in the picture follow suit. A good example is if you take a picture of a landscape and meter off the clouds you find that you get stunning cloud deffinition. The flip side being though that the ground is then underexposed. it works vice versa. Meter off the green grass and the sky is over exposed. So spot metering doest work in all situations.

A situation which came about this weekend though was when i was taking photos of Banjo my friend Laura`s Dog. Banjo is a black dog and was lieing on a white sheet and a coloured blanket. with evaluative metering the camera didnt know what to do it was trying to find a happy medium between the extreme white and extreme black of the dog so all photos just came out over exposed. including the hound. When i spot metered on Banjo the camera exposed him perfectly brining out his black coat a dream.

Quite pleased with these. The contrast between banjo and her black coat along with the coloured blanket and white sheet works nice i think. a real AWWWW moment :-)

The Knitting Lady

When i first showed this picture to a guy at work he was mortified. The very thought that i had taken this photo without the subjects consent made him very upset. Is it bad to take photos of random people without asking them? Ive seen some perfect sunset photographs of afghan soldiers sat in waiting on hill tops wrapped in blankets to shield themselves from the approaching cold. Do you think the photographer actually said:

"ermm excuse me would you mind terribly if i took a quick photo?"

Highly unlikely.

I took this photo on the way back from london. It was such a perfect moment i had to get the shot. There was no way she would have noticed she was concentrating so much on the job in hand. I love the colours of the wool and how they contrast with the background. I would have liked to see more of her face though.

Portraits

Well ive decided to kick off this blog with a portrait section. i love taking pics of people they tend to make the best subjects. the trick being to catch em when they are unaware. poseing is rubbish. interesting light..interesting colours and a dodgy expression. You ll notice that a lot of them are of my friend Alex. He is one of few of my friends who likes haveing their picture taken.




Durham by the sea - Alex a close friend. i didnt know how to edit out the red eye so its pretty obvious hes paraletic.



 

This is just a random woman who i met on a photography workshop. i really like her smile. its really subtle. I really like the lighting too. but thats what you get for useing high quality equipment.




This was just some girl at a party. nice medium format photo.





This dude is always around brighton. Sporting kicking flamed prints and white gloves. a through back from the early 80s rave scene? too much halucanagenics...or however you spell it.





My ex Ruth and me. Snake eyes..





Emma. Awesomely talented photo friend.





Alex. At Pride....in pink





Natasha. Taken on a nikon F3 1980s studio camera.





Dave .Just before the last world cup. Taken on a neat little TLR i got.





Matt. shame i didnt use low enough F stop. his right shoulder is out of focus.



This is just a handful really of some of my portraits. ive tried to mix it up with digital and analogue. A lot of what i do is in digital at the moment but mainly because of my need to do this as a career. Commerical value and all that. My aim is to add specific projects to further posts. Comment away and watch out for more posts.