Light Metering Methods; Exposure And Metering - FujiFilm X-Pro1 User Manual

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Light metering methods:

This example illustrates how the X-Pro1's three different light metering methods work.
This high-contrast test scene features a foreground with a dark tree trunk, a much
brighter empty field, and a sky with very bright clouds.
When using multi metering (top), the camera analyzed the contents of the image
frame and decided on a (somewhat lazy) compromise: the tree trunk still shows some
detail, the field is properly exposed, and the sky is overexposed, appearing white and
devoid of almost any detail.
Spot metering (middle) honed in directly on the dark tree trunk and assigned it
a middle gray value. This resulted in a tree trunk that is (artificially) light while the
remaining elements in the image are even brighter. This method resulted in several
areas for which the sensor couldn't capture any detail at all.
Average metering (bottom) assigned greater value to the large bright areas of the im-
age than to the dark tree trunk. The result is a much more conservative exposure and
a darker image. Here we see detail in the sky for the first time, but the tree trunk now
appears underexposed.
On first glance you might not agree, but the average metering produced the best
results in this instance, despite the underexposed areas. While blown-out highlights
are impossible to fix, blocked-up shadows can be rescued with image-editing software.
More on this in the following pages.
The camera displays the level of compensation on the
exposure scale found near the left edge of the viewfinder
or monitor display.
Unfortunately, the digital indicator for the
compensation correction is not particularly
conspicuous (at least as of now), which means
that often you will inadvertently forget to change
the correction setting from one shot to the next.
Make a habit of checking the indicator in the viewfinder
or the actual compensation dial before snapping each
new exposure—not least because it may happen that the
compensation dial was accidentally shifted in your equip-
ment bag or when you were changing out a lens.
2.3

Exposure and Metering

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