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Understanding Your Built-in Light Meter - a photo group meetup


The thing with 'Murphy's Law' is that it is bound to mess with your plans. When I originally scheduled this workshop on using your camera's built-in light meter I was hoping for some of the worst lighting nature could give us. What better way to learn to adjust our techniques to extreme lighting conditions than to actually be in those conditions...

Well, it seemed that Mother Nature was not going to cooperate with our plans. What was supposed to be a nice weekend quickly changed into a nasty, wet and chilly day. While it was not pleasant to work in what really ruined it for me as the instructor was that we ended up having some of the most beautiful light any portrait photographer could ever hope for. Wouldn't you know it!

As you can see form the above photo, it didn't stop us from having a good time anyhow. Since the light was so perfect, I really couldn't get into how to meter and compensate for bad lighting as I originally wanted to. Instead we had a fun session shooting our two models then getting one of the boyfriends involved. Even though I didn't get the opportunity to cover all the info I originally had planned, I did get a sense of accomplishment when some of the members became overjoyed at their new-found ability to meter properly and get a good exposure in manual mode. The same with a member that finally understood how exposure lock worked and another who caught on to exposure compensation.


Bravo. Event though Mother Nature was uncooperative, we still made progress.

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