Check the Exposure Comp Dial Every Single Time
Okay. Small lesson today but I want you to take it seriously, because it's the one that cost me an entire hike.
I was up American Fork Canyon a few years back, in the fall, shooting a stand of scrub oak that had turned that orange-red color that only lasts about a week and a half if you're lucky. I shot for two hours. Got home, pulled the memory card, and every single frame was blown out. Overexposed, all of it, the color gone flat and white in the highlights. I'd bumped the exposure compensation dial with my thumb early on, probably before I'd even started, and I never checked it again because I didn't think I needed to.
That bothered me for a long time. Not just because I lost the shots, but because it was so avoidable. One glance at the dial would have caught it in the first five minutes instead of the last frame two hours later.
So now I check that dial literally every time I turn the camera on. Not sometimes. Every time. It takes one second and it has saved me more than once since.
What the exposure comp dial actually does
If you're shooting in a semi-automatic mode, aperture priority or shutter priority, the camera is making some of the exposure decisions for you. The exposure compensation dial lets you tell the camera "make it brighter than you think" or "make it darker than you think." It's usually marked with a plus and minus scale, something like -3 to +3, with 0 sitting in the middle.
At 0, the camera is exposing the way it thinks is correct. Move it toward plus, everything gets brighter. Move it toward minus, everything gets darker. It's a useful tool. Snow scenes, for example, often need a little plus compensation because the camera sees all that white and tries to darken it down to gray. That's a real use for the dial.
The problem is the dial is usually small, sits right where your thumb naturally rests, and moves easily. You adjust it once for a good reason, forget to set it back, and then everything you shoot after that is wrong in the same direction. Two hours of scrub oak, in my case.
The actual habit to build
Here's the thing. This isn't complicated. It's just a habit, and habits are built by repeating something boring until it's automatic.
- Turn your camera on.
- Before you frame a single shot, look at the exposure comp scale. It's usually on the top LCD panel, or in the viewfinder, or on the back screen depending on your camera.
- Confirm it's sitting at 0, unless you have a specific reason to have it somewhere else.
- If it's not at 0 and you didn't put it there on purpose, move it back.
- Do this every time you pick the camera up, not just at the start of the day. If you set it down and picked it back up, check again.
That's it. That's the whole lesson, really. It's not a hard concept, it's a discipline problem, and I say that as someone who still has to fight it a little.
An opinion while we're here
I'll be honest with you, I think people spend too much time worrying about buying better gear and not enough time building small checks like this one. A nine dollar habit will save you more good photos than a nine hundred dollar lens will. My grandson, who was maybe nine years old at the time, picked up my camera once and shot the dog in full manual, just guessing at every setting, no idea what he was doing, and got a better composed photo than most of what I'd taken that year. He didn't know what exposure comp was. He just paid attention to what was actually in the frame. There's a lesson buried in there about equipment mattering less than attention, and I think about it more than I probably let on.
One caution
If you're adjusting this dial in bright sun and looking at your LCD screen to judge whether it looks right, know that the screen lies to you outdoors. It'll look one way in the shade of your own body and different in direct sun. Trust the histogram if your camera shows one, not just your eyeball on a bright screen.
Before next time: shoot ten frames at home, on purpose, with the exposure comp bumped to +2 and then ten more at -2, so you know what wrong looks like in both directions and you'll spot it faster next time it happens by accident.