Exposed: Your Camera Lies to you.

It’s true. Your camera lies to you. To be fair, it doesn’t mean to, it’s just not as smart as you are. When it comes to figuring the right exposure, what it doesn’t know, it just guesses at.

I’m sure you’ve seen it. You are taking a photo on the beach and the sun is hitting the water behind the person and when you look at the picture you just took, the water looks great but you only see person covered in shadow.

Do you ever wonder why that happens? Well, it’s because the light meter in your camera, while being a sophisticated piece of technology, is dumb. it doesn’t see the way your eye does. It looks at the light coming in your lens, calculates the average brightness, then figures the exposure so that the primary brightness value is gray. Why? Because gray is halfway between black and white. It’s the midpoint.

I know you don’t have a lot of time, so let’s do quick, basic experiment. Let’s shoot a photo of a white wall based on what the camera’s light meter says. Then let’s shoot a photo of black wall and expose it by what the meter says. You’d expect the white wall to be white and the black wall to be black, right? Check out these two photos:

OK, the photo on the left is the black wall and the one on the right is the white wall. Told you so. The light meter tries to make everything grey. If your subject was an even mix of light stuff and dark stuff, your image would be perfectly exposed. And, while that happens quite often, your camera can be easily fooled if the image you are trying to capture is composed of mostly dark or light stuff. So, here’s an example. I shot this running man against a white wall.

The exposure on the left was based on what the light meter said was the correct exposure. The photo on the right was over exposed by two f/stops over what the meter said. Notice on the left photo how the light meter tried to make the background gray? That’s because the majority of the light coming in was white.

So what does this mean to you? First of all, just being aware of how your meter works will improve your ability to get the correct exposure. It is also a good case for shooting your camera on manual settings so you can make judgments as to proper exposure. Use your meter as a starting point, then let your brain take over to make the adjustments to exposure based on your subject and the lighting situation.

Anyway, I’m sure you have more important stuff to do than read this blog, so go something important. Or fun. It’s springtime and fun is always good. 🙂

Thanks for reading.

-Ken.