The Digital Zone System

Chapter 3Digital Exposure and Metering

No approach to editing and printing digital images will work if we can’t get the image right at the time of exposure. With digital cameras, the old computing maxim applies: garbage in, garbage out (aka GIGO). This chapter will walk through the basics of metering and exposure in digital imaging, so we can minimize the G.

Metering

Most of us tend to use the reflected-light meters in our cameras. These are wonderful tools that help us to get a correct exposure, but still aren’t perfect.

There are also handheld meters that can be used like in-camera meters to measure light reflected by a subject, or in incident mode, to measure the light falling on a subject. Many handheld meters are also able to measure light ...