I know it varies drastically depending on what lighting situations you are in. I am doing a film project and I plan on shooting my sister in the water (not IN but above water). I will probably be shooting on a fairly sunny day. My question is, what do I meter off of? My teacher said to meter in the same shadow as your subject, but I also heard that you can meter off someone's nose. How do you do that?|||If you want the shadow to be black you DECREASE exposure by two stops, i.e. close the aperture or increase the shutter speed. If you increase the exposure the shadow will become grey. This is metering for the deepest significant shadow, part of the zone system.
Set your meter to spot metering - it is the most accurate. If you have a hand held incident meter, which is what is used in motion picture shooting, use the incident dome. Read the manual if you are unsure how to operate the meter.
Meter off of the skin and set that to zone 6 or 7 (assuming she has a light skin tone.) To do this you open up one to two stops from the metered value. Here you are metering for the midtones.
The absolute correct exposure is rendered by doing an incident reading off of a grey card. The grey card is 18% grey which is what the meter is balanced for. When you read a meter what it is telling you is how to render that area at 18% grey. If you don't want that area to fall right in the middle of the tonal range, you must compensate by decreasing (stop down, metered on shadows) or increasing (open up, metered on midtones or highlights.)
As you are doing a film project, I would recommend you test before you do your actual shoot. Meter carefully, write everything down and bracket your exposures (this works for movie film too). Take it to the lab and analyze the results. Sometimes what seems like it should be correct does not look as good as the bracket shot.|||SLRs (and DSLRs) have different metering modes. Your owner's manual will tell you what options you have with your particular camera. You will probably see terms like Evaluative, Center-Weighted and perhaps Spot Metering. Each does something different with the existing light, and each may come up with a different exposure.
If you wanted to meter a person's nose, and your camera had spot metering, you would just put the center focus point on the person's nose and read the settings (if you have it set for aperture priority, you would read the shutter speed. If shutter priority, read the aperture. If shooting in Manual, adjust either your shutter or aperture to get the exposure you want.
An alternate way of doing this is to stand close to the person and zoom in so their face fills the viewfinder and check the readings. This should get you close to a spot meter.
Hopefully your instructor has also talked about bracketing. Even with film (and maybe especially with film, as you might not see your results for several days) you should take the same shot with a couple of different exposures. Usually +1 and -1 exposures gets you in the ball park. The bad news (especially with film!) is that you'll want to use at most 1 of the three shots you took - the best exposed one.|||Another thing you can do that will probably work - if you can't get a good tight reading on the subject - is to meter off the open sky. Use the spotmeter for this. Set it so that the sky would be one stop overexposed and your Earth-bound subject will probably be okay.
In other words, point the camera meter at the sky and set it so that the indicator matches up with the point that is marked +1.0. Alternately, if you match up at zero with the sky and it says that the sky would be "perfect" using 1/125 at f/8, set the camera to shoot at 1/125 at f/5.6 or 1/60 at f/8.|||When shooting negative film the saying was, expose for your shadows and process for your highlights.
However, when shooting slide film and digital, I believe it is important to expose for your most important highlight, (i.e. the one that you don't want blown out.)
What you choose to actually meter off of is irrelevant unless you know how to interpret that meter reading appropriately. For instance, if you are metering off of a shadow, do you want that shadow to be pure black? Then you need to increase exposure by 2-stops.
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