Photography Class at Delaware Art Museum, #3: Exposure Compensation

During this class we learned about exposure compensation, spent a lot of time reviewing our homework and learning about how to improve our diagonals and other composition techniques, and then a quick introduction to aperture. This post will be on the exposure compensation.

Our teacher explained that a camera has a built in light meter.  By changing the exposure compensation you are telling the camera to make it lighter or darker.  When you do this, you don't know how the camera will do that.  It might change the ISO, the shutter speed, or the aperture.  You should only use exposure compensation if your pictures are always too dark or too light. 

At least on my camera, the exposure compensation button looks like this:



The corresponding view finder image looks like this number line:
 








The further left (larger negative numbers) you go the darker the image will be.  And, the further right on the number line the lighter your pictures will be.  Zero is the normal setting for the camera.  So, if you pictures are normally darker than you'd like, you might want to fiddle around with moving your exposure compensation dial to the right.  On my camera you do that by holding down the "AV" button pictured above, and then moving the main dial one way or the other. You can do this while looking through your view finder since the number line appears there.  You can also set this in your menu under exposure compensation.





 Exposure compensation cannot be used in Manual mode, just P, TV and AV.

Here is a what happens if you change the exposure compensation on my camera:

ZERO: (the way the camera would automatically set it)

Minus 1: (a little darker)

Minus 2:  (darker still)

 Plus 1: (a little lighter)

Plus 2: (lighter still)

It's funny how we learn things, but when I was initially trying to find the exposure compensation button on my camera I thought it was the Dioptric adjustment knob (seen below) which is is NOT.  But, since I stumbled upon it I'll mention what it is.  The Dioptric adjustment knob is relative to the person looking through the view finder and what makes the picture clear to the person taking the picture.