Exposure compensation - making your snow white

Posted by Nigel Goldsmith on Monday 06 February 2012 at 8:31am
Tags: cameras | photography |

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In a 'typical' scene containing a range of tones from bright highlights through to dark shadows, the camera averages out the tones in the scene and selects a shutter speed and aperture to produce an acceptable image containing a good tonal range.

When pictures are taken of very light subjects, such as our seasonal snowman picture, or very dark subjects the camera's built in light meter may be confused and produce images with anaemic blacks or insipid whites. The photographer can avoid this by dialling in an exposure compensation value. To lighten whites the exposure may be increased (+ value) while dark subjects often benefit from underexposure (- values).
Professional photographers often take a number of images of the same subject with slightly different exposure settings and then select the best exposed image. This is known as exposure bracketing.
Illustration of image with normal exposure on left and with +1stop exposure compensation on right

Image by DCMatt used under the terms of the Creative Commons licence

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