Exposure Compensation

In some situations you’ll have to tell your camera how to compensate for its measured exposure.

Imagine you are taking a picture of a person in front of a white wall. Chances are that your camera will try to compensate for the bright wall and make the picture too dark, so that the wall is exposed correctly, but the person (the main subject) will come out too dark. The same applies to photography where there’s a lot of snow present in the picture. Snow in those pictures is likely to come out grey instead of white. This can also be seen on the beach where the sand and the sky are bright.

Another situation where your camera’s built-in metering is likely to be fooled is if you take pictures of people on stage, where you have a black background and the subjects are brightly lit. In this situation the camera tends to compensate for the large black background and as a result, the subjects are likely to be overexposed.

In both of these situations you might have to give your camera a compensation factor in order to make up for the specific situation.

Exposure compensation is measured in f-stops.

Here’s some typical situations where you might need to use exposure compensation:

• Backlight situations
• Stage situations (Concerts, Theater, Opera, ...)
• Snow photography

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