R5/R6 Metering

Basil Fawlty wrote:

PDE94301 wrote:

Basil Fawlty wrote:

If I could ask Canon to make one change to the R5/R6 or other R series cameras, it would be to enable a feature that would allow the camera to meter the scene based on where you have the focus point aimed.

I believe how metering works, is say you have spot metering or evaluative metering set - the light for the shot is metered from roughly the center of the scene. But what if your focus point is somewhere to the left or right and the lighting in that part of the scene is much different?

It would be nice to have a feature (selectable) that would allow you to have the metering based on wherever you have the focus point aimed. I would think this could be accomplished with a firmware update?

Do you have a "wish" for future firmware upgrades?

Although Canon's literature on the inner workings of evaluative metering for R5/R6 is sparse, I believe it does give some additional weighting to the focus point. I don't think it's a true spot meter as the exposure doesn't seem to change massively when moving the focus point from very light to very dark areas. I agree that a true focus-based spot meter would be a nice additional option, as would having a smaller area for the spot metering they do have. Additionally, I would like to see them add real-time highlights/blinkies pre-capture (as opposed to only being viewable after the shot), and a 14-bit ES mode (even if it's single shot only).

In a recent video with Canon Technical Advisor Rudy Winston, he is asked about this and confirms that, with the exception of, I think it was the 1DX Mark III, the Canon's spot metering is in the center of the scene when the metering is initiated and is not linked to the focus point. He further says (paraphrasing) that this is an issue he's heard before and has passed the concern to the product developers at Canon.

I've always found spot metering to be a great manual exposure technique, so that I can measure the highlights, the shadows and the mid tones and come to a synthesis.  The OM 3 and OM 4 spot meters would even average up to eight readings automatically.  Of course, to do that, you need to find the metering spot every time, which is why Canon put it right in the middle of the screen.  The problem with tieing the spot meter to the focussing point is that focussing works best on a high contrast area which is likely to mislead a spot meter.  Canon's evaluative metering does, in my experience, bias the reading fairly strongly towards the focus spot but not to the exclusion of the rest of the image.  That's what I use for auto exposure with occasional adjustment of the exposure compensation if the exposure simulation looks a bit off.