Most of the
time, your camera exposure meter does a great job of determining the right
exposure. However, it cannot always be trusted. The system of your camera meter
takes the average of all the shades and measures the light in a frame with a
few clever refinements. In many cases, the exposure information fooled by
backgrounds and subjects that are either too dark or too light. Luckily, you
can manually adjust the exposure to get the best result.
It’s time to
give a try to the exposure compensation. Almost every camera sold today comes
with this feature, whether it’s a digital or a DSLR. Put simply, this handy
feature can set the camera to under or over expose by adjusting the exposure.
If you find a button marked with a “+/-“ icon, it’s definitely the exposure
compensation button. It has a great impact of the quality pictures you get in
high-contrast or low-light scenes.
Basically
though, it’s often hard deciding whether to decrease or increase the exposure
in a scene. Sometimes, the exposure adjustment you’ve selected is out of your
expectation. The easiest way to set the exposure compensation is to look at the
subjects of your main interest. Here’s the tutorial of using exposure
compensation, depending on the subject.
Light Subject
The scene
you get may be under-exposed, when you shot a light subject. You need to
increase the exposure to get better scene. Simply press and hold the exposure
compensation button. Then turn the slider to the right and the exposure value
will increase to +1.
Dark Subject
You may
find that your camera will over-expose the scene, when the subject you want to
shot is likely containing mostly dark tones. This time, you have to reduce the
exposure. After you press and hold the exposure compensation button, simply
turn the slider to the left.
It’s
important for you as a photographer to turn the slider back to the former
position once you have finished.
How to Read the Histogram to Determine the
Exposure in a Scene
You may find
a difficultly when checking the exposure of the scene. Simply take a single
shot as reference and use the histogram display on the rear screen of your
camera to know the exposure you deal with. It’s quite easy to know a picture is
whether under or over exposed since the histogram is a bar graph. If the graph
goes off the left of the histogram and there is a quite wide gap to the
right-hand side, your picture is under-exposed. Otherwise, over-exposed picture
is characterized by the graph that goes off the right of the histogram and
there is a gap to the left-hand side.
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