Do your eyes glaze over when you hear the term metering modes? They can be confusing for sure, and I would like to try to shed some light on this to help your photography along. Basically here is what the metering modes do. The metering system is what the camera uses to decide your shutter, aperture and ISO need to be, for the correct exposure. It measures the brightness of the light and tries to expose it as roughly 18% grey.  The camera is going to try, in every scenario, to make an evenly balanced image but we all know that sometimes, the camera does not produce what we expect. That may be due to the metering modes. Let me run through the modes on my Nikon Z9 to help shed some light on this. Don’t worry, other brands have these choices as well. Nomenclature may vary, but they all have them.

First up, Matrix Metering. This is the mode that I shoot in 95% of the time for my style of photography. This will read the entire frame to work out the correct exposure. It works very well when the scene is evenly lit. Like any mode, it can have some pitfalls. Matrix metering can be fooled at times with high contrast scenes where the image is predominantly dark or bright. In those situations, where the majority of the frame is lit to an extreme, Matrix will often need some Exposure Compensation to help it out. 

This will expose for the middle of the frame as it states. The problem with this metering, is it relies on your subject being in the centre of the frame, which isn’t always compositionally the best place for it.  For me, shooting wildlife and aviation, that really is hardly ever the case. This may be an option for other genres where the subject is not moving, but for me, this one is not an option.

This will take a meter reading from whichever focus point is currently active. It works in all Focus Modes. This can fluctuate even more depending on the type of lighting. I think Spot is best suited to constant lighting and static subjects. For me personally it does not suit wildlife photography at all. As with all of these modes, you have to experiment to see what works best for your style of photography.

This will read the entire frame but look for bright areas and try to underexpose a little to keep them from blowing out. This can work well where the brightest areas of the frame are large and obvious.  The issues comes into play when working with images where the brightest areas are very small elements of the frame, such as heavy rim-light. In shots such as this, the thin outline of bright light on the subject isn’t always enough for the metering to account for it. This means exposures can still be too bright and highlights can still be blown out. 

Hopefully these basic explanations of how metering modes operate have helped clarify some things for you and you can begin to implement the one that works best for you. Certainly using the correct metering mode, letting the camera do some of the heavy lifting will help you photography move along. Let me know your favorite metering mode in the comments below.