Keep asking yourself what metering mode to use? Discover how to master metering to get perfectly exposed images in every situation.

• Canon Custom Picture Styles

Here, with some help from our friends at the, we show you what metering mode to use on your Canon DSLR. But even if you shoot with a different brand, many of the same principles still apply. Taking a photo is often referred to as 'making an exposure'. This is because when you press the camera's shutter release button the mirror that reflects the image into the viewfinder flips up out of the way, allowing the imaging sensor to be exposed to light.

Canon Custom Picture Styles

Another sensor inside the camera, called the metering sensor, is central to this whole operation: it measures the light that's coming through the lens and determines how much is needed to produce a well-exposed photo. SEE MORE: Of course, you can let your camera do everything and hope it produces the goods - and much of the time it will. However, you'll often be able to improve things if you get involved in the process, and the first step is to choose the metering mode the camera uses to measure the light. The majority of Canon EOS cameras have four metering modes: Spot, Partial, Centre-weighted Average and Evaluative, all of which work in the same way. As light is reflected from a scene or subject through the lens, it hits the mirror in front of the imaging sensor and is reflected up to the camera's focusing screen and metering sensor. Canon photo editor software download. However, each of these modes takes an exposure reading from a progressively larger part of the frame. Backuptrans android iphone whatsapp transfer plus. As the name suggests, Spot metering offers the most precise metering - anywhere from 1.5%-10% of the total picture area, depending on the camera - while at the other end of the scale, Evaluative metering takes a series of readings in zones that cover the entire frame.

SEE MORE: Since the launch of the EOS 7D in 2009, Canon has used a 63-zone iFCL (intelligent Focus, Colour and Luminance) metering sensor in almost all of its EOS cameras (the exceptions being the 1-series bodies and the EOS-M). In Evaluative mode, this sensor not only measures the brightness of a scene across all 63 zones, but takes into account colours and which parts of the scene are in focus. The camera then uses a metering algorithm to determine the combination of aperture, shutter speed and ISO required to make an exposure - and it does all of this in a fraction of a second, before you fully press the shutter release to take the shot. SEE MORE: Thrown by the midtones There is one problem with this system.

Camera meters are traditionally calibrated around the amount of light reflected by a midtone subject. Point your lens at a midtone scene or subject, such as rolling green landscape or grey stone church, and there's no problem - the meter can be relied on to give good results. However, if you're taking a shot of a snowy landscape, or a swan flying across a pale sky, the image is likely to come out too dark, or underexposed. This is because the meter interprets a bright subject as being a midtone subject that's receiving too much light, and as a result it reduces the exposure - that's why ice-white snow can be recorded as pale grey. The reverse is true of a subject that's darker than midtone. The meter sees this as midtone subject that isn't receiving enough light, so it increases the exposure in order to brighten things up.