How do you personally measure exposure?

J

JaredSMark

Active member
You've got the exposure level indicators on the Canon itself, multiple different ways to measure in Magic Lantern like the Zebras and spot indicator, you can use oldschool light meters, and you can also just eyeball it either on the LCD or in the EOS Utility software. How do you personally go about it and what are your thoughts on what the best way to do it is?
 
histogram

live on some DSLRs and if not - take a photo at the same settings and look at the histogram

but you have to learn how to read it.
 
The brightness histogram always confused me a bit. I understand how it works and how to read it, but exactly what should I look for to make sure I've got the correct exposure?
 
Personally I just try and make sure I'm not clipping in either shadows or highlights.

But that's just my personal experience.
 
Old fashioned incident light meter. If I know how many footcandles are falling on a scene, not only does that give me my exposure reading (one must know their lens because f-stops and t-stops are not linear in the world of video asa as they are in film), but then I can also always reproduce the lighting EXACTLY because I know exactly how much light is falling on the scene.
 
I try to expose to the right: let in as much light as possible without clipping the highlights (or going overboard in a more general sense).
About the tools: the best one is a waveform; if that's not available, a histogram will have to do. Eyeballing is quick and intuitive but more error-prone.
 
Magic Lantern waveform is quite nice. I'm still just barely starting to understand it, but it tells you a very detailed story of your scene. There are two blue lines across the wave form box. My goal has been to keep the middle of the exposure between those two lines. Anything below is crushed to black and will noise up. Anything above the top blue line will clip. Lines correspond roughly to 7.5 - 100 IRE. Left to right is the gray scale from dark to light.

Telling which part of the waveform is the piece of your scene you really want is the hard part. For my type of wildlife work, I can't control lighting and I get what I get. The cool thing about the waveform is I can get it centered and based on what I see I can let the areas I don't care about go. Those can clearly be seen above or below the blues lines. I just try to keep that area of the waveform to a minimum.

The Histogram is a quick and dirty. Keep the peaks in the middle right as Samuel said and you're good to go. The waveform really tells you what you might get. If you have alot above and below the blue lines, you're going to have a tough time in post.

Cheers,
Pete
 
I try to expose for highlights most of the time. I would rather try to keep my highlights tame than expose for shadows, a lot depends on the shot. I use a histogram for piece of mind, you have to be careful though, certain situations can trick the camera into thinking it's exposed properly when you can clearly see it's not. This applies to mostly stills though.
 
Wave form monitors show you legal non-clipping display video values, but in some cases apparently clipped values can be recovered in post if they did not exceed the DR of your sensor to recorded media processing path. More and more cameras are capable of actually recording detail beyond the levels indicated by in camera zebras and scopes.

I use a combination of a profiled incident meter with the in camera meters and zebras to determine exposure settings.
 
On DSLRs I do it primarily by eye. On bigger shoots where there were multiple cameras and a camera department to support me, I'd find time to walk the set with a light meter and check light levels the way you're "supposed" to as a cinematographer. Since moving away from DSLRs, I use a waveform monitor.
 
LIVE View is the best. One thing I like about Canon EOS DSLR's is the LCD screen on the back is ULTRA ACCURATE! So accurate in fact that you can just eyeball your exposure, whether it be to shoot as flat as possible or if you are purposefully overexposing or crushing different areas, LIVE View is the best way.

Histogram is great if you are syncing the exposure between multiple cameras.
 
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