Quick Tips: The Right Metering Method on a Nikon D80

[ music ] ^M00:00:02 >> The D80 from Nikkon is an amazingly smart digital SLR, but it can't read your mind. I'm Brian Cooley with a Quick Tip on how to set the metering mode so it almost can. First of all, turn the camera on. Then you're gonna find this button here by the shutter button, looks kinda like a cross hairs in a rifle scope. It's not. Press that down and then rotate the sub-menu wheel. That's under your right thumb on the back of the grip. As you move through the three modes, you'll find one of them looks like that. That means an averaging. It takes the entire image and averages it out to get the exposure for everything that you're pointed at. Go one more and you see this one here. That means center weighted. In this mode, the camera's gonna focus on what's in the heart of the image and disregard what's around the periphery when it sets the exposure. That's great for portraits. When you want someone's face to be just right and what's around their head can be too bright or too dark, as long as the face comes out just the way you want. And the last mode in this space is that one right there. The dot in the middle. That means a very pinpoint focus. It's single point exposure. By doing that, the camera is going to only expose for the point which is also where the focus is being measured from. That's a great technique for something very small in a large field or something which you know you're going to crop the background away from later. You can just get the metering right on that one spot and ignore everything else. So these are three levels of tightness if you will, of how the camera scales down what it looks at when it sets exposure. They're easy to set and it's easy to go back of course to the full averaging mode. This has been a Quick Tip on how to set your metering method on the D80 and similar Nikkon DSLR's. ^M00:01:44 [ music ]