Digital Photography Tips – Using The Exposure Lock To Get The Correct Exposure

Posted on | December 23, 2009 | No Comments

The exposure compensation feature of your digital camera can be a very effective way to correct the exposures you?re getting in your camera?s fully automatic mode. But it requires taking a series of photos until you have the exposure just right. Here is a simple techniques to take care of some common exposure situations that can fool your camera?s auto exposure system, without as many steps as setting up your digital camera?s exposure compensation feature. It may not work every time, and you may have to go through the steps of using exposure compensation, but it will work many more times than not.

Normally, to determine the correct exposure, your camera will evaluate the brightness of the entire scene you are shooting and will calculate the average brightness of the entire scene. This usually works in most situations, but if you are shooting on a really bright, sunny day, for example, and your main subject is in the shade, the bright sunlight can overwhelm the auto exposure feature, causing your subject to be under-exposed and too dark.

Almost all digital cameras have a feature called exposure lock. This allows you to aim the camera at one scene to let the auto exposure system calculate its settings, and then you can aim the camera again at your real subject and take a shot, while preserving the settings from the first scene. You?ll have to look in your digital camera?s manual to check how to activate the exposure lock on your camera, but for most cameras you push the shutter button halfway down and hold it there to lock the exposure settings.

For example, if a bright sky is making the scene on the ground under-exposed, point the camera down until the scene on the ground fills the viewfinder. If your subject is in the shade, point the camera at the shady area. Lock this exposure setting by pushing halfway down on the shutter button. Then reframe the scene to include the sky. This locked exposure setting may now over expose the sky, but your subject on the ground should be correctly exposed.

Using the exposure lock is a very simple technique to master that should be in the bag of tricks of every digital photographer. Happy shooting, and may all your photos be neither too dark nor too light.

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