Hi all,


which metering mode do you use for photographing isolations (objects or persons on a white background with appropriate lighting)?

For my first shots I've been using the evaluative metering. However, from reading the manual of my EOS 400D it seems to make much more sense to use "center-weighted average" or even partial metering.

Which one do you use for isolations?

All the best,
Michael

Don't use any of the averaging methods--center-weighted, evaluative, etc.  Use spot or partial spot.  The problem with using averaging is that it will always result in underexposure with a white background and over-exposure with a dark background.

Your best bet is to use a handheld meter and use incident mode.  Or, use the camera's spotmeter.

Are you using flash, hot lights or daylight?

I mainly use strobes & I have a flash meter, so I use incident readings, camera on full manuel. I use multi flash set ups so I meter for each light, so I can have a ratio that gives good modeling and hair seperation from the background.

The background lights are set to between, one or one and a half stops brighter than the subject lights. I nearly always mask the lights from the subject to avoid spill from the background back onto the subject, (Model). This is with white backgrounds.

For product isolation I have a medium or large softbox on a boom directly over the subject, on white seemless paper as close as I can to the object, meter with the flash meter for the product, then clean up the white background in photoshop with a levels curve.

Mastering good white isolations can be very profitable in stock photography, so good luck with  it.

why don't you put your camera on manual, and then take a few test shots to figure out what to set the lighting at.

that way it won't matter what get's metered the lighting will always be correct.

I do always use full manual. But still I have to chose the metering method. I think I know what you mean though, I was thinking that metering does more than just adjusting the exposure indicator*1. If it does only that, then it probably really makes no difference in full manual.

All the best,
Michael

*1: I thought that it might somehow help in getting the object correctly exposed while still making the background white. With my current setup I always have to slightly overexpose the object to make the background white. I guess I need stronger lights?

All camera meters are set up and calibrated to see the world at 18% grey, so it wants to make your white background grey, it also wants to make a black background grey.

If you overide your meter by using the exsposure compensation by + 1.3 to 1.7 ev that will help towards a white background, it will also make snow & white sand look cleaner.

1). Yes you will still need to over expose the white background even using a custom white balance, the custom white balance will just keep the colours on track. How about this..if your photographing women with a custom white balance, with daylight balanced flash, you will loose a nice suntan skin toned, whereas if you shot with a cloudy setting, (6000k) with daylight balanced flash, your models would look to have a healthy skin tone.

2). I always shoot strobes at 1/250 shutter in the studio, the main effect of adjusting your shutter speed is to allow more ambient light into the scene, so if you were shooting in a building and did not want the dark effect that flash drop off would have, or you want the outside scene to be included, then dropping the shutter speed would do all the above.

For white isolation I shoot without exposure/flash compensation and adjust my background lights to over exspose the background by one to two stops.

p.s. I always shoot RAW so I can adjust white balance afterwards, in case I make a mistake at the time of shooting.