Exposure compensation is a function in the digital compact or slr camera which is often misunderstood or neglected by most of beginners. It is one of the important features to control the exposure/light so that it is similar to natural light. We can also create a dramatic scene (low key/high key) using this function.
We know that every camera have exposure metering, such as matrix / evaluative metering, spot metering, center-weighted metering and so on, but sometimes, those metering could be wrong, especially evaluative metering. Older digital cameras tend to fail more than new one.
Knowing how to use exposure compensation will really make a different. To adjust exposure compensation, look at the symbol +/- on your camera. Some camera has dedicated button shown like image in the right, but some cameras might not have it, therefore you need to access the menu to change it.
When to use Exposure compensation?
You’ll need to adjust exposure compensation when your camera metering system failed to recognize the scene because they are mixed light or high contrast light in the scene.
For example, when shooting a room lit by candle light, the camera tend to think that the entire room is too dark, therefore camera choose a setting to gather more light. At the end the overal image look overexpose and the mood is lost. In this case, you need to adjust exposure compensation accordingly, for example -1 or -2.
Without exposure adjustment, camera will interpret that this image is underexposed therefore it will overexpose the entire image and the mood will be lost
On the other hand, in the environment or scene where there are there are plenty of white light such as snowscape, camera metering system will fail to recognize the scenes and underexpose the image because the camera think that the snow (white) is too bright and try to tone it down to gray. Therefore, you need to adjust exposure compensation up to +1 or +2.
This snow in this photo looks blue-grayish. The entire scene is underexposed because camera setting failed to recognize the snow. So, exposure compensation adjustment is needed
Of course there are many other condition where the camera metering system fail to capture the real mood of the scene, but since you are now understand about exposure compensation, you can easily adjust it to capture the optimal image.
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