There is a setting on your camera called Exposure Compensation Value or EV.

Exposure compensation (EV) can be used if your pictures are coming out too dark or too bright. The EV adjustment fixes it.

There are three interdependent variables in digital photography.

Shutter Speed

Aperture

Film Speed

Throughout the pages of this site I talk about how these three interrelate. For now just remember each will affect the other two. When you understand and find the correct balance your snapshots will transform into photographs.

In any program mode the camera does not always make the right choices for a properly exposed picture. In other words the camera balances out the three variables listed above in an electronic way, rather than the way you desire. When this happens you change the exposure compensation value accordingly.

The first picture below was shot in aperture priority. I took the picture just the way the camera showed it would look best. You can see it is pretty dark. Often this will happen when you are shooting in the shade.

The camera wants to balance out the sunny area with the shady area. This will result in neither being correctly exposed. You can change your metering mode to “Center Weighted” metering, but I find many times this doesn’t work well either.

Rather than that I prefer to use the exposure compensation. I won’t even get into exactly what happens within your camera. However it is accomplished, the important thing is the end result. That is a properly exposed picture.

What I did is known as bracketing. The first picture, set at 0.0, was too dark. For comparison purposes, I reset the EV to -1.0. This resulted in the second picture above, which is even darker. Then I brightened it up by setting my E.V. to +1.0 which resulted in the bottom picture.

EV is adjustable in increments of 1/3, 1/2, or a full stop depending on your camera.

I still didn’t quite like the result in the third picture so I reworked it in Photoshop a little. You can see the subtle but necessary difference below. The top picture is before and the bottom, after.

By combining knowledge in the field with a little post editing I ended up with what I consider a beautiful photograph. It’s crisp, colorful and bright without being washed out.

Had I not been familiar with the exposure compensation settings on my camera I would have just dumped the shot. Yet this is a photograph I am proud to display.

Let’s talk about another one. This picture, another one taken in the shade, is also underexposed. It underexposed for a different reason than the sailboat. Read about it here. The copper lamp shade and down spout just look dark and flat.

I reset the EV to +1.0. That brightened it up considerably. You can actually see that it is copper.

As with the others, I reworked it in Photoshop. This added some dimension to the picture but I can’t decide whether I think the wall ended up too bright! I don’t know.

The final picture for discussion is this one. It gets a little more involved in order to come up with a presentable finish photograph.

I shot it at the same three exposure compensations as the pictures above. 0.0, -1.0 and +1.0. I found that in order for it to work best I had to take a portion of each exposure and combine them.

In Photoshop, I took the floats from the first picture, the background boat from the second and the netting from the third.

When I combined them all the parts were properly exposed and make a great photograph. Thus is the miracle of Photoshop!

Exposure compensation value is fairly simple to understand and use but to me it is an indispensable feature of my camera.

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