In response to the article on “What to Focus on – Hyperfocal Distance and more“
Dunne W asked the question: “What would you recommend when you want place you focus for the Hyperfocal point in the scene, but also a Good Midtone for metering for our HDR’s. I guess what if a midtone is not in the area of the Hyperfocal area?”
Which really is a great question because depending on what Focus mode you are in, The focus point used may also be the point used for the camera’s metering.
Now if you are shooting in manual exposure mode. This really isn’t too big of a problem. Simply before you lock your camera into the tripod. get a 0 metering point from your scene ( as Duane says a midtone) remember that shutter speed and then work to each side from there. ( Quick tip if you don’t want to do the math of what the shutter speeds you need to shoot at for your exposures, do this. Set your 0 exposure shutter speed and then for your next exposure count the clicks of the exposure wheel, 3 for each stop you want, 6 if you were doing 2 stops. No need to even look in the viewfinder)
This really is a more important question if you are doing Automatic Exposure bracketing in Aperture Priority mode. Because establishing a correct 0 exposure will ensure that those exposures that are bracketed around that o point are correct as I talked about in this post.
- Adjusted our exposure manually as I stated earlier
- Using the exposure lock button on our camera. Unfortunately, this only stays active for 5 seconds if you take your finger off the shutter release. So even if you lock it, if you don’t take the image within 5 seconds it will re-meter the scene
- Use Exposure compensation along with Exposure Bracketing, Which is something I do very often.
You can use Exposure Compensation by either just figuring it out mathematically. The sky where I am pointed at is 1/400 and my midtone is 1/100 therefore I need to set -2 stops EC. Or you can let the camera do the thinking, Point it at your midtone and get a reading and then put the camera in shooting position and adjust the compensation till you get the same reading you did when pointed at the mid-tone.
Of course EC is usually limited to 2 stop +-, so if it is really far off between the two areas. It’s always best to just resort to manual exposure
Hope that helps
PT
2 Comments
This completed the puzzle and the lightbulb just went off!!!!! Just did a quick test and it worked perfect. Now to reproduce this in the field
Thanks again!!! :))
Great Duanne, can’t wait to see what you shoot. When you get home send us an image and we will feature it here on the HDR Image