Manual mode exposure confusion

[monkster]

Hi I'm using a Nikon 8700 and am trying to learn to take pictures in Manual mode.
When adjusting the shutter speed and aperture settings, there is an exposure display telling me if the shot will be under/over-exposed, and I change the shutter speed/aperture setting accordingly to compensate.

Questions:
1) The exposure display does not take into account the light from the build-in flash right, if activated?
2) This metering function, where I can select Spot/Matrix etc metering, is it working even as I'm adjusting the settings as mentioned above, or only when I press half-trigger?
3) For White-balance adjustment (the part where I can measure an area) when do I need to use this?

Thanks for reading!

[LittleWolf]

Originally Posted by monkster Hi I'm using a Nikon 8700 and am trying to learn to take pictures in Manual mode. When adjusting the shutter speed and aperture settings, there is an exposure display telling me if the shot will be under/over-exposed, and I change the shutter speed/aperture setting accordingly to compensate. Questions: 1) The exposure display does not take into account the light from the build-in flash right, if activated? 2) This metering function, where I can select Spot/Matrix etc metering, is it working even as I'm adjusting the settings as mentioned above, or only when I press half-trigger? 3) For White-balance adjustment (the part where I can measure an area) when do I need to use this?

The answers to the first two question may depend on the camera model. If the manual doesn't tell and you don't get the answers here, you may have better luck by asking in the Nikon Equipment forum where more people may be familiar with this camera model.

White balance has very little to do with exposure. It is about tweaking the colours so they appear "right". The colour of an object depends on both the properties of the object, and the colour of the light illuminating it. The human sense of vision is good at tuning out colour differences due to different colours of the illumination. E.g., when you look at a piece of "white" paper at candlelight, it really is yellow - but you probably still perceive it as white.

A camera is more objective and records the colour as it is, which may not be how you "see" it. The white balance function is used to tell the camera what should turn out white (or neutral gray) in the picture. The camera then compensates for the colour of the light according to your specifications.

[MDZ2]

In manual mode, most if not all cameras will not take into account flash exposure. This is because the built in meter only measures available light. Further more, shutter speed does not have any effect on exposure in flash photography. The only useful thing that a camera could do in manual mode is to limit the shutter speed to below the flash synchronising speed (which I don't think any camera does at present in manual mode).
In anycase, the only reason I can think of using manual mode in flash photography is to do a slow speed sync to combine flash with ambient lighting for more natural pictures. In this case, the metering should be measuring the available light while the flash metering will ensure the corrrect flash exposure.