It’s that mysterious plus/minus button on your camera. It sounds so technical–exposure compensation. Do you ignore it because you think you’ll never understand it? Or have you tried to use it at times? Well, I’ll be honest…even though I knew what it was for, I hadn’t used it much until I started my Project 365. But now that I’ve been taking a picture every day, in a variety of situations, I’ve come to see the usefulness of this little button.

So, here’s a basic rundown of how your camera works. It looks at all the light in your scene and tries to render things to be a midtone (as in, not too bright and not too dark–right in the middle). So, let’s say you’re in the shade of a big oak tree on a sunny day (so there’s still plenty of light, even in the shade), and you take a picture of your friend. If the lighting is nice and even (there aren’t any bright spots in your background), then your picture should come out pretty nicely. No real dark spots, no super bright spots. That’s because all the information in your scene is pretty much a midtone already. It’s not bright white and it’s not dark black.

*Pretty standard…even, soft lighting–great for portraits.*

So what happens when you’re at the beach, or surrounded by the bright white snow in the winter, and you want to take another picture of your friend? Let’s think about what we just said about how your camera sees things. It sees a very bright scene, and it wants to make it a midtone. So, I point my camera to the very bright scene, and what comes out is ashy, gray snow…or a dull shot of the sandy beach.

*Yuck.*

And this, my friends, is where the exposure compensation comes in. In this bright scene, your camera wants to render everything midtone, so it won’t make everything as bright as you see it. You need to tell it to overexpose. Press your little plus/minus, and you should see a scale. Yours should be set right in the middle, at 0. You can move it up or down, usually in increments of 1/3.  For a bright day with snow or a beach, I’d probably start with +1 (on my camera–you’ll need to experiment).

*Since I didn’t use exposure compensation in camera, I had to adjust this shot in photoshop. Takes more time, and I believe you should strive to get it right in camera, and photoshop is used for enhancing.*

*The majority of this shot is very bright. If I had just let my camera do the thinking, the snow and sky would have been a dull midtone, and my subject would have been pretty dark (since the light is behind her). Instead, I told my camera that it needed to overexpose so that it would show how things really looked.*

How about a scene that is mostly dark? Let’s say I’m taking a shot of my black lab, Sabana. I should set my camera to underexpose, so that it doesn’t try to lighten her up too much. So I press my exposure compensation button and go to -2/3.

*Even though the actual flowers were in pretty bright light, the ground was all in shadows, so I needed to underexpose this shot, probably about -1/3 or -2/3. If I hadn’t, my camera would have rendered the ground a little too bright, and therefore the flowers would have come out brighter as well. Since the flowers were the most important part for me, I had to make sure the background didn’t mess things up.*

Once you start to experiment, you’ll learn more about how much to compensate depending on your situation. You have to determine how bright something is, as well as how much of your shot it is taking up. As you learn, make sure you don’t make the final judgment call until you check out the results on your computer–the LCD is often too small or not in the best lighting to really see which picture comes out the best.

Assignment: Find a white wall that you can take a picture of and have it completely fill up your frame. Take a shot or two first, then set your exposure compensation to +1. Take a look and see if it came out bright white enough (as best as you can tell on your LCD), and play around with your exposure compensation a little more. Try increasing it if you think the wall needs to be brighter, or decreasing it if you think it came out too bright.

You can do the same with a black or very dark wall, but just use the opposite settings (-1 EV). When you upload the pictures to the computer, you can see which one rendered the wall as bright or as dark as it really was to your eye.

Good luck!