Street photography tip: Exposure compensation

Saturday 23 September 2023, 13:31 by Michiel Heijmans | 3,637 views | 0 comments

This article was translated from Dutch with the help of AI. Read the original.

Most cameras have an option to adjust exposure compensation just before you take a photo. Ideal for correcting your camera's automatic metering to suit your taste or a particular lighting situation.

London - f/2.5, 1/500s, 250 ISO @ 40mm
Your exposure is perfect when your aperture, shutter speed and ISO are balanced so that the exposure meter, usually a line with numbers from -3 to +3, sits neatly at zero, in the middle of that line.

But that might not be what you have in mind at all. I always advise cherishing your shadows, your dark areas. For example, if you are photographing through a tunnel, you might want to focus on the light at the end of the tunnel.

If you turn or set your exposure compensation towards -3, you will see that the light part of your photo automatically becomes clearer. Sometimes an adjustment of -0.3 or -0.7 is enough.

Because you can often recover detail from shadows in post-processing, but not from overexposed parts of your photo, my camera is often set to an exposure compensation of -0.3 by default.

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