Reflection on a pond, compensating in manual exposure mode.

Reflection of the shoreline on a pond; exposure was way off.

Although I am a big fan of aperture priority exposure mode (the "A" selection in the PSAM group) for many of the situations I find myself in, my second most common choice is manual.  In this mode the camera reads light coming into the camera and compares it to the current exposure and ISO settings.  If everything is bang-on, the meter will show that a "correct exposure" is possible in the viewfinder and/or on other camera mounted LCD displays. 

The reason "correct exposure" is in quotation marks is because the camera may just be mistaken.  In the situation above, my first image proved to be an overexposure.  It turns out there are a lot of dark areas in the scene.  The camera's meter read the situation as there wasn't too much light available and so suggested a longer shutter speed.  The resulting image was clearly off by quite a bit.  My solution was to change the shutter speed by letting less light in than what the camera suggested.

In an automatic mode this is done by using either exposure compensation or exposure lock.  In manual mode the command dial controlling shutter speed is rotated.  Alternatively, you can also change the aperture value, the ISO, or a combination of all three.  For the most part though I opt to change shutter speed as I want depth of field to remained unchanged.  With vibration control technology being so common and good, this often is not an issue.  In this case it was even less so, because I actually had to increase the shutter speed to let less light in.

I decreased the light by 4/3 of a stop (1.3 stops for those with a fraction phobia) and shot again.  The result was much better, rendering the dark areas dark and the bright areas properly exposed.  The nice thing about shooting in manual exposure mode is that, once you have figured out the correct settings, you can continue to use them if the light remains the same.  Areas of shadow and backlighting may occur, but I find previously used manual exposure settings will often be correct.

I used a polarizer in this situation as well which helped remove unwanted glare from the water and deepened the already very blue sky.  The shutter speed was 1/50th of a second at an ISO of 200 and an aperture of f/7.1.  I used a 28 mm focal length on a full-frame camera.

Thanks for reading.   www.ericspix.com