timeimmortal

Here’s one last picture from the Vancouver trip, and another shot from the rest stop along the Coquihalla Highway. Unlike in Vancouver (and much of the rest of the British Columbia interior), however, the weather along this particular stretch of the highway was rather wintery (a function, I suppose, of the higher altitude) — complete with icicles hanging off of the rest stop’s washroom building.

I’ve been playing around with center-weighted averaging on my camera, a form of light metering. Since I tend to shoot in aperture priority mode, the camera uses metering to determine an appropriate shutter speed given the amount of available light in a given scene. Center-weighted metering considers light across the whole frame, but with a bias toward the middle 60% of the frame.

I find that I tend to prefer its results to those of evaluative metering, which uses a more complex algorithm. This shot is rather indicative of why, as well: while the snow and ice on the top of the frame, and the mountain in the background, are obviously a bit underexposed, they are not so underexposed as to be devoid of recoverable detail — Lightroom’s Fill Light tool brought some of the main details out again. At the same time, the sky is not overexposed, and the icicles are exactly as exposed as I had hoped they would be.

~ by Kenneth on May 30, 2008.