Which setting?

[Brian J Moody]

Should I be setting my camera to spot, centre weighted or multi metering when using manual focus lenses?

[GeorgeSalt]

Depends what you're doing and your own personal way of working.

Whichever mode you use, you'll have the same issues to overcome - what the camera expects of the aperture whilst you're measuring the exposure, and what it's actually getting through the lens.

[fuzzywuzzy]

That's a great question!

Like a lot of good questions, the answer is "it depends"

Here's an article that might help:
http://photographylife.com/understanding-metering-modes

[casualcollector]

Depends on what you are accustomed to using. I tend to default to a limited area or semi-spot metering pattern as I learned on a Canon FT forty years ago. Try the camera's default metering pattern and if you're not happy with that, try another, if available.

[cooltouch]

Casual collector is describing Canon's "partial area" metering pattern, as is found on the FT, FTb, and original F-1. I became very comfortable with this same metering pattern in my film-shooting days. It is a great pattern for shooting slides, and since digital sensors have a very similar latitude range as slides (that is to say, narrow), it is a very effective metering pattern for digital sensors as well. I use partial area metering only with my EOS DSLR. If it had a spot mode, I would probably use it on occasion, but once you become familiar with this metering pattern, you can learn how to use it almost as effectively as a spot mode. If the scene is unusually lit, with bright light sources within the frame which would cause a regular metering pattern to underexpose the image, with a partial pattern, you can move the camera around slightly so that the partial pattern can meter various areas of the frame that will be closer to correct exposure, which means you can then evaluate your readings and decide on a best exposure. The above is what I would routinely do when I encountered an unusually lit scene back in my slide-only days. It's a lot easier than it sounds.

Whether or not you're using mf lenses on your digital doesn't make any difference, seems to me. Focusing has very little to do with metering. The exception being the use of a macro lens that has a lot of extension when focusing it -- then that can affect metering.