Specular Highlights - This is a reflection from a light source. This usually happens with shiny objects or around the outer edges of images.
Spot Meter - This is a light measuring device which covers a narrow circle of the scene.
Specular highlight. Bright spots in an image caused by reflection of light sources.
Specular highlight
A bright reflection from a light source containing little or no detail. Specular highlight within an image should not be used for Set Whitepoint.
Any area of the subject (except specular highlights) that is outside of this range is reproduced either too light or too dark in the final picture.
Imagine a point source of light such as a quite distant light bulb, a reflected specular highlight, or even a star in the night sky. Anything that will appear to be a single point rather than a shape.
It adds a specular highlight to the image that becomes a focal point. If you’re not familiar with this trick, you need to play with it. Stop the lens down to f22.
Catchlights are specular highlights from a light source and draw attention to the subject's eyes.
Specular highlights (such as reflections on metal or water), regions around the sun (such as in sunsets) and other direct light sources (such as street lamps) all appear perfectly fine when clipped.
This doesn't apply to bright, specular highlights (such as those found on water, for example), where the sun glints off of an object. This will always be pure white and probably should be, unless it's over too large an area.
Where we'd expect ghosting to be apparent are images which contain very small specular highlights, such as distant streetlamps in a night scene, or reflections from a shiny object which are - again - very small in the frame. Examples are shown below.
The highlight detail is no longer clipped (the colored spikes on the right of the histogram are specular highlights and should be clipped). In addition, it appears that there might be a little bit more shadow detail than with the first tonal curve.
DYNAMIC RANGE: Film has a huge advantage in recording highlights. We take for granted the fact that specular highlights and bright sunsets look the way they do in painting and on film.
That's the way you photograph dark skin.... by bringing in specular highlights from both sides. Nor is it necessary to open up the lens any more than usual. Light crossing over the skin brings out great highlights.
This is done to avoid the common E-TTL problem of highly reflective materials causing specular highlights in a flash-illuminated image and throwing off the flash metering.
When a histogram shows pixels at the extreme ends of the range, in the 0 and 255 positions, it means details in those tones are lost or "clipped" in your image. These extremes should be reserved for specular highlights (reflections) and small dark ...
Multiple exposures can eliminate noise and also reveal more fine image details in the highlights and shadows. This will be most noticeable in the sharp specular highlights and pronounced textures.
Measuring the light hitting a surface is particularly useful because it eliminates the possibility that the camera's meter is fooled by specular highlights. Bright areas of a scene like the sun, lights and other elements won't throw off the metering.
The assistant will be there to hold a reflector, which may be either your main light if the sun is at the back of the animal, or the source of a catch-light in their eyes. (A catch-light is the bright specular highlight in the eye that gives it it's ...
An unusual scene with a preponderance of light colors or specular highlights would have a higher reflectance; a reflected-light meter taking a reading would incorrectly compensate for the difference in reflectance and lead to underexposure.
I address contrasty situations in my "Pick Your Battles" section. Having the ability to expose slightly "right of center" doesn't work too well with high contrast situations. Also, the clipping of specular highlights is fine, too.
Usually reds will appear unless more than one channel is blown out. So unless my image has specular highlights that I’m willing to sacrifice I hold the alt key and slide the exposure up until the first red pixels appear then I back off a tad.
Because dust marks show up as dark specks and are unfixable, spotting Ilfochrome is, for me, usually for the purpose of removing defects such as people in landscape scenes, "hot spots" from specular highlights, etc.
 See also: Highlight, Image, Camera, Light, Photograph
  
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