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I always run with EV comp at -.7

E

EOM

Senior member
Am I the only one who does this? All of my cameras are setup with EV down 2/3 of a stop. I don't know if I read it in an article online or just decided to do it. My theory being that shadows are easier to pull up in post than dealing with blown out highlights and as another benefit it also allows me to keep the shutter speed up just a BIT more. (I mostly shoot in Aperture Priority mode)

Am I trying too hard and overthinking it or is this just a terrible idea?
 
For birding, I'm almost always running +0.7
Birds against the sky ( particularly if it's grey outside ) and I'm almost always getting underexposed images. Sometimes if it's really gray, I'm going +1.

For normal shooting, I'm either manually setting exposure or just using whatever the light meter says.

But... you have the right idea. It's remarkable the detail you can pull out of underexposed images.
 
a lot easier to recover shadows than blown highlights with my 6D. So I tend to do the same even though I shoot in M all the time. Another reason why I don't like showing clients back of the camera images.
 
I usually have mine on 0 since the meter is my camera is really good and I can easily change metering settings instantly. I use the directional pad to choose which part of the image to meter most of the time.
 
What's interesting about this is that a few years ago, there was the ETTR (expose to the right) club who had a pretty sound argument for slightly over-exposing.
(The reason is that there are more bits of data in the shadows, and fewer bits in the upper end... so, it's easier to recover shadows than highlights. Wait... am I saying the same thing backasswards?)
 
CuriousMike said:
What's interesting about this is that a few years ago, there was the ETTR (expose to the right) club who had a pretty sound argument for slightly over-exposing.
(The reason is that there are more bits of data in the shadows, and fewer bits in the upper end... so, it's easier to recover shadows than highlights. Wait... am I saying the same thing backasswards?)
Click to expand...

You can recover shadow detail easier (underexposing can be fixed easier). Most of the lower end DLSRs and compact cameras tend to underexpose slightly.
 
CuriousMike said:
What's interesting about this is that a few years ago, there was the ETTR (expose to the right) club who had a pretty sound argument for slightly over-exposing.
(The reason is that there are more bits of data in the shadows, and fewer bits in the upper end... so, it's easier to recover shadows than highlights. Wait... am I saying the same thing backasswards?)
Click to expand...

yes. if there is more information in the shadows, you shoot to make sure highlights are correct OOC and fix shadows in post.
 
turtile said:
I usually have mine on 0 since the meter is my camera is really good and I can easily change metering settings instantly. I use the directional pad to choose which part of the image to meter most of the time.
Click to expand...

its true that most modern cameras do a great job with it when using Matrix metering or whatever, but they can still have issues with high contrast scenes

and the amount of shadow detail you can pull out now is pretty insane
 
I saw an article a while back that I'm having trouble finding again, but it basically showed that certain camera manufacturers already purposely underexpose because of some benefits to image quality. It definitely varied by manufacturer though.

I've always had trouble with anything other than spot metering, but maybe that's because I do like contrasty lighting scenarios so spot is the way to go here.
 
This has been pretty common going back to physical film days where the rule was underexpose for slides and overexpose when shooting negatives. You can always pull some detail out of the shadows but nothing makes your blue skies gray (or white) like a little overexposure.

Does no one use an ambient light meter anymore?
 
CuriousMike said:
What's interesting about this is that a few years ago, there was the ETTR (expose to the right) club who had a pretty sound argument for slightly over-exposing.
(The reason is that there are more bits of data in the shadows, and fewer bits in the upper end... so, it's easier to recover shadows than highlights. Wait... am I saying the same thing backasswards?)
Click to expand...

At least with earlier sensors that were fairly limited in dynamic range, ETTR made perfect sense. There is more data captured in the highest "stop" of a sensor's dynamic range (it used to be about half of the data captured I believe). The next stop down had half of that amount to work with and so on for whatever the dynamic range was. So, by shifting the image to the right, more data was captured and the shadows could then be fixed in post processing.

I think with the newer sensors better dynamic range this probably isn't such a big deal anymore, but with earlier cameras properly using ETTR could make a huge difference assuming you were willing to put in the post processing time. I used to expose to the right but these days my 70D does a good enough job that I really don't bother with it anymore.
 
The most consistent way to preserve details in highlights is to spot-meter from those highlights and to use +2.5 to +3 EV compensation over the spotmeter readings. Another good way is to bracket the exposure.

-0.7 EV may be too much, or too little, depending on camera meter calibration, raw converter, and the dynamic range you want to capture.

In many raw converters zero position of the exposure slider is not a zero, as I'm trying to demonstrate in https://photographylife.com/where-are-my-mid-tones and https://photographylife.com/where-are-my-mid-tones-baseline-exposure-compensation
 
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