Creative exposures

Understand that the amount of light that your camera is confronted with has a vast range, from bright sunlight on snow to moonlight. Unless you do lots of research and have lots of experience, it would be difficult to determine precisely which exposure to use without the use of a light meter, such as the one in your camera.

To help us with this, all consumer digital cameras except perhaps for the very cheapest ones have a built-in light meter which measures the amount of light and sets the aperture, shutter speed, and ISO sensitivity according to some formula built into the camera.

This ‘standard exposure’ should be your baseline for creative control of your camera. You modify one or two of the basic parameters, and the camera adjusts the other ones accordingly, keeping the same total exposure.

An important technique is overriding the standard exposure, giving the camera a bit more or a bit less light than what the meter indicates. This is called Exposure compensation and you can read more about that here:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exposure_compensation. You adjust the standard exposure up or down which will brighten or darken your final image accordingly.

Instead of using manual mode, where you have to guess the total amount of light out there, you can use one of the automatic modes and simply adjust your exposure from that baseline. As mentioned, trying to guess the absolute exposure is difficult, most particularly around sunrise and sunset. If you use your meter and automatic exposure, then you can creatively adjust your exposure with your camera’s exposure compensation feature.

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