Thu Aug 17, 2017 7:09 pm
I myself learned the hard way to ignore reflective metering when photographing aircraft because the scene changes quite often depending on how much the aircraft/scene is in shadow.
For example if you have evaluative metering selected and most of the scene contains a blue sky, it will set exposure to the sky, dimming it down, and making your plane slightly underexposed.
Generally you want the sky a touch higher exposed because the plane is in shadow. If I am shooting ground to air, I prefer to give lighting priority to the aircraft, since there is no interest in the background aka the boring blue sky. If I have some clouds, I will underexpose the plane JUST a touch, making sure I don't clip the highlights in the clouds.
My most comfortable way I've been doing it is the following:
1. Place my camera into live view mode with histogram as overlay
2. Looking at histogram, I check what proper exposure should be in the brightest part of my scene (highlights)
3. Next I check what the proper exposure should be in the darkest parts of my scene (shadows)
For example: I take point my camera at runway along some tree lines, lot of things in shadows, and it says my proper exposure is 1/200.
Then I point my camera in sky toward Sun and it says proper exposure is 1/800.
3. I set my exposure in the middle of my results.
4. I set exposure compensation with values of -1 , 0, and +1 stops to capture the entire range.
This situation generally works for me because the different in light between shadows and highlights is usually within a stop or two, which the dynamic range of my camera is capable of handling.
On a sunny day where lighting is even, there is not much variation between the stops of light, so bracketing -1 and +1 exposures is plenty good enough.
The only downside to my system is you have a LOT of extra photos, however I find its an acceptable trade off considering the lighting landscape changes as you pan throughout the scene, or zoom in/out to photograph the aircraft. I would much rather get a evaulation of how the lighting is in my scene, and bracket around it to get an appropriate exposure to my liking, than have the camera meter consistently mess up and underexpose the shots.
Most of the time you will find you are limited in what exposures you pull off with certain scenarios.
For example at airshows, for air-to-air shots, you need to set the shutter speed to a slower speed to capture prop blur, so you can't really be any higher than 1/250 of a second. This means you are forced to either use a ND filter to keep your aperture down, or use a narrower aperture (f/16, f/22) which limits your sharpness.
Jets are the easiest to film because you can set your shutter speed to a higher amount 1/1000, but you want to be mindful of HOW fast you can do, because the aperture of your lens, even at wide open, may still underexpose the shot.