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Anonymous
NatureGuy summed it up pretty well, but a few things:
1. Wikipedia "zone system." You don't have to actually shoot with it, I don't, but learning it is a pretty good way to get a good, intuitive, deeper understanding about what's going with exposure and tones.
2. There are three main metering modes: Centerweighted average, spot, and then a third one everyone likes to make up their own name for: Canon calls it evaluative, Nikon calls it matrix, Pentax calls it multi, Olympus calls it multi-pattern, and I don't know what Sony or anyone else calls theirs.
Spot metering is exactly what it says: you point your camera somewhere, it reports back what exposure would make that exact spot medium gray. There's some variants of this you'll run into, like partial, which is just a gimped version of spot with a slightly larger area measured, not useful unless your camera doesn't have spot, and then there's multi-spot, which will average a few spot meterings together, usually something you can handle yourself. (E.g. if one spot says 1/250th and another says 1/500th, you probably want to set your camera to 1/320th or 1/400th.) Spot metering is the most accurate if you have time to do it and understand what it's telling you.
Centerweighted average (CWA) is exactly what it says. It meters the entire frame and averages all the exposures, with algorithm weighted to the center. It's useful when you don't have time to spotmeter. It gives you one nice, quick result, but you still know what it's doing and if, say, there's a big black shirt right in the middle of the frame, know to use a faster shutter speed so the black shirt doesn't end up gray.
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